Iain Pears

The Raphael Affair

HARPER

To Ruth

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Author’s Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

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About the Author

Also by Iain Pears

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Some of the buildings and paintings in this book exist, others do not, and all the characters are imaginary. There is no National Museum in the Borghese Gardens, but there is an Italian art squad in a building in central Rome. However, I have arbitrarily shifted its affiliation from the carabinieri to the polizia, to underline that my account bears no relation to the original.

1

Generale Taddeo Bottando walked up the staircase covered in stolen works of art slightly before the bell of San Ignazio struck seven in the morning, as usual. He had turned up in the piazza a good deal earlier but, as was his habit, had passed ten minutes in the bar opposite the office drinking two espresso coffees and eating a panino filled with fresh ham. The habitués of the bar had greeted him as befitted a regular breakfast customer: a friendly ‘buon giorno’, nods of acknowledgement, but no attempt at any more conversation. Waking up, in Rome as in any other city, is a private matter that is best done in quiet solitude.

That pleasing early morning ritual over, he crossed the cobblestoned piazza and wheezed up the stairs, puffing and blowing heavily before he even finished the first flight. It was not that he was fat, so he reassured himself often. It was years since he’d last needed his military uniform let out. Portly, maybe. Distinguished-looking, he preferred. He should give up cigarettes and coffee and food and take up exercise instead. But what enjoyment would life have to offer then? Besides, he was nearing sixty, and it was too late now to start getting in trim. The effort would probably kill him anyway.

He stopped for a moment, partly to look at a new picture hanging on the wall, but more for a surreptitious opportunity to get his breath back. A little drawing by Gentileschi, by the look of it. Very handsome. Pity it would have to go back to the rightful owners when all the paperwork was done, the culprit charged, and the documentation sent over to the public prosecutor’s office. Still, it was one of the compensations of being the chief of the Italian National Art Theft Squad. On the rare occasions when you did recover something, it was generally worthwhile.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ a voice said behind him as he peered at the artist’s work. Suppressing the last remnants of his breathlessness, he turned round. Flavia di Stefano was one of those wonderful women that Bottando believed only Italy could produce. Either they became wives-and-mothers or they worked. And if they worked, they had to strive so hard to stave off guilt feelings about not staying at home that they were twice as good as anyone else. For that reason eight of the ten researchers were women. This, he knew, had caused his department to win an unfortunate nickname in other parts of the service. But at least Bottando’s Brothel, as his obviously jealous colleagues had dubbed his bureau, produced results. Unlike certain others he could mention.

He beamed a benevolent good morning at the girl. Or rather woman; he noted that he was now at an age when any woman under thirty counted as a girl. He liked her a great deal, even though she seemed totally unable to give him the deference to which his rank and age and wisdom entitled him. While some friends referred delicately to his certain roundness, Flavia called him, affectionately and without the least sense of shame, old tub. Apart from this, she was an almost perfect junior colleague.

Flavia, who also resolutely insisted on wearing sweaters and jeans to demonstrate that she fell into neither the policewoman nor serious businesswoman category, smiled back at his greeting. It was genuinely meant. In the last few years, the General had taught her an immense amount, mainly by leaving her alone to make mistakes, and covering for her afterwards. He was not one of those employers who see staff as a convenient herd of lambs to be sacrificed whenever something went wrong. Rather, he took immense pride in teaching his charges to do things properly and allowed them considerable, if always unofficial, independence. Flavia, more than most, had responded with enthusiasm and had become a full investigator in everything but name.

‘The carabinieri near the Campo dei Fiori rang and want to bring someone around,’ she told him. ‘They arrested him last night breaking into a church on their patch and they say he has an odd story to tell. They seem to think it is more in our line of business.’

She spoke in the harsh, nasal accent of the north-west. Bottando had hired her direct from the university at Turin, and she had abandoned a graduate degree to come to Rome. She always maintained that she would finish it eventually, and used this as her main reason for not joining the police fulltime. But she worked so hard in the department that it seemed very unlikely. She had the fair hair and light skin of many northern Italians. Even if she hadn’t been simply but definitely beautiful, her hair would have made her stand out in Rome.

‘Did they say what it’s about?’

‘No. Just something about a picture. They reckon he may be a bit crazy.’

‘What does he speak?’

‘English and some Italian. I don’t know how much.’

‘In that case you will have to talk to him. You know what my English is like. Let me know if he has anything interesting to say.’

Flavia made a mock salute, two fingers of her left hand pressed briefly against the fringe of meticulously disarranged hair that edged half-way down her forehead. Both of them wandered into their respective offices, she to the small, cramped one she shared with three others, he to the more luxurious one, decorated almost entirely with more stolen objects, on the third floor.

Bottando settled down and went through the morning ritual of going through the mail left on his desk in a neat pile by his secretary. Normal nonsense. He shook his head sadly, sighed heavily, and tipped the entire pile into the bin.

Two days later, a bulky document awaited him on his desk. It was the fruit of Flavia’s interrogations of the prisoner brought round by the carabinieri, and bore all the hallmarks of her conscientiousness. On top of it was a little note: ‘I think you’ll like this one – F.’ In principle, the interview should have been conducted by a full policeman, but Flavia had swiftly switched into English and gained control of the proceedings. As Bottando flipped through the pages, he realised that the man clearly spoke Italian quite well. But the policeman on duty was fairly dull and probably would have missed almost everything of interest.

The document was a condensed transcript of the interview, the sort of thing that is sent along to the prosecutor’s office if the police think a case can be made. Bottando got himself an espresso from the machine in the corridor – he was an addict of many years’ standing who now could not even get to sleep at night without a last-minute caffeine fix – put his feet up and began to read.

For the first few pages there was little of any interest. The prisoner was English, aged twenty-eight and a graduate student. He was in Rome on holiday and had been arrested for vagrancy when found apparently trying to sleep in the church of Santa Barbara near the Campo dei Fiori. Nothing had been stolen and no damage reported by the parish priest.

All this took five pages, and Bottando was wondering why his department had been called in and why the carabinieri had bothered arresting him. Sleeping rough was hardly a major offence. Throughout the summer months, foreigners could be found snoring away on almost every bench and in every open space in the city. Sometimes they had no money, sometimes they were too drunk or too drugged to get back to their pensione, just as often there was not an empty hotel room for miles and they had no choice.

But as he flipped over the next page he became more interested. The prisoner, one Jonathan Argyll, informed the interrogators that he had gone to the church not to camp out, but to examine a Raphael over the altar. Moreover, he insisted on making a full statement because an enormous fraud had taken place.

Bottando paused. Raphael? The man clearly was off his head. He couldn’t remember the church very well but was convinced that he knew the location of every Raphael in the country. If there was one in a tiny little church like Santa Barbara, he would know about it. He walked to the computer and switched on. When the machine had hummed and whirred itself into readiness he went into the database that had been built up giving the locations of likely targets for thieves. He typed ‘Roma’, and, when it asked for more details, specified ‘chiesi’. He then typed in the name of the church. The machine instantly told him that Santa Barbara had only six objects that were potentially stealable. Three were bits of silver, one was a seventeenth-century vulgate Bible with an embossed leather binding, and two were pictures. But neither was a Raphael nor likely to be confused with one. Both, in fact, were very second-rate affairs that no thief worth his salt would waste his time stealing. The market for purloined, nine-foot by six-foot crucifixions by anonymous Roman painters was not exactly buoyant. Nor could he see much demand in the illicit international art trade for the altarpiece – a Landscape with the Repose on the Flight to Egypt by the magnificently mediocre eighteenth-century painter Carlo Mantini.

Going back to his desk, he read on for a few more lines, convinced that by ‘interesting’, Flavia merely meant that her document was yet another demonstration of the foolishness of mankind. She was very strong on this interpretation of human nature, especially as far as art collectors were concerned. Several times the department had abandoned the hunt for a minor work when they discovered that it had been bought – as a Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio or whatever – by a wealthy foreign collector with more money than sense. To get their revenge they wrote to the buyer informing him that he had been cheated, and passed on word to the local police. But, on the whole, they considered the humiliation the man would suffer was adequate punishment, and generally the work was too unimportant to go to all the trouble and expense of international arrest warrants and deportation orders.

So perhaps this fifty-page document simply catalogued the delusions of an unbalanced moron who had persuaded himself he could get rich quick? A few more glances rapidly persuaded him there was more to it than that. From being a question-and-answer session, the document settled into a sustained narrative, the result of a lengthy statement. Bottando read on, and became more puzzled:

‘…studying for a degree based on a dissertation about Mantini. During my research, I discovered a series of documents that proved beyond any doubt that Mantini earned money by working for art dealers in Rome in the 1720s and had taken part in a sizeable fraud. You mustn’t think that Italy’s restrictions on exports of works of art are new. Most old states had them even back in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century they were becoming onerous. The Papal States in particular were getting poorer, and lots of foreigners were coming here wanting to buy. So, various routes were worked out to bypass the regulations. The most usual was the most obvious: a series of judicious bribes. Pictures were also temporarily reattributed to some obscure painter, until an export licence was given. Occasionally, dealers would go so far as to cut the picture into fragments, ship it to London or Paris, then reassemble and repair it.

‘The more important the painting, the more difficult it was to get it out of the country. I suppose that is also true now. And the most difficult of all were those by – or thought to be by – the great triumvirate of the Renaissance: Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Several times dealers or collectors bought works by one of these artists, asked the papacy for permission to export, and were turned down. In many cases the pictures are still here. So, when the di Parma family wanted to sell their most valuable possession, something illicit was clearly needed if they were to collect the money.

‘The di Parmas had been a great family, one of the most powerful in central Italy. Like many others they had fallen on hard times, and when the Earl of Clomorton offered to buy their Raphael for an outrageous sum they agreed. To get it out of the country, they enlisted the aid of an English art dealer called Samuel Paris, and he turned to Mantini for extra assistance.

‘The routine they came up with was beautifully simple. Mantini was to paint over the Raphael and the picture was to leave the country as one of his works. When it got to England the new painting would be cleaned off and the Raphael would take its place in the Earl’s collection. Presumably Mantini used a coat of varnish to protect the painting underneath, and used only paint that could be removed easily.

‘I don’t know any of the details of how it was done technically, but I do know it was done. There is a letter in the Clomorton archives from Paris assuring the Earl that he had watched Mantini apply the paint and seen the Raphael disappear under its disguise. But Clomorton never hung his picture on his wall.

‘At some stage something went wrong, either accidentally or deliberately. The picture must have been switched; the payment for the Raphael was handed over and a different picture was sent to England. Shortly after it arrived, the fraud was evidently discovered and the Earl died. The family doesn’t seem to have mentioned the matter again.

‘The point is, the Raphael was covered by Mantini – this was seen by Paris; it never got to England; and it disappeared from the di Parma collection. On the other hand, the family owned a Mantini in 1728 that they hadn’t had four years earlier.

‘Now, all of this suggests that the Raphael stayed in Rome under cover. If that was the case, I don’t know why they never wiped the disguise off. But they didn’t, the Mantini stayed in the collection and was evidently considered to be of such small importance that in the 1860s they donated it to Santa Barbara as an altarpiece.

‘And there you are. The picture has rested unknown in that church for more than a century. I first saw it a year ago when I was working on my dissertation. Then I decided a Raphael may be underneath, came back to check, and it’s gone. Someone has pinched the damn thing.’

Even when seen through the stilted prose of an official document, the prisoner’s sense of outrage was clear. Not only had he been jilted out of one of the most remarkable art discoveries of the decade, he had got himself arrested as a vagrant to boot. If, indeed, it was a remarkable discovery. Either way, if the painting had vanished, it was something to look into. Seeing an excuse for a stroll, he summoned Flavia, walked down the stairs, and set off for Santa Barbara.

One of the delights of his job, so Bottando thought to himself as they walked, was the chance of living in Rome. Although not born here, he considered himself very much a Roman and had spent most of the past thirty years in the city. Much of his dislike of his previous assignment in Milan had been prompted not by the job, but because he had had to live in a city which he regarded as soulless and drab.

Then came his great opportunity. Bottando was summoned back to Rome to combat the growing number of thefts of works of art throughout Italy. The creation of his department was due to the theft of a dozen famous works from one of the best – and theoretically best guarded-museums in the country. The police, as usual, hadn’t known where to start. They had no contacts in the art world, didn’t know the likely instigators, hadn’t a clue what might have happened to the paintings.

In a country where the love of art is part of national identity, the matter quickly bubbled up into a potential scandal once it had been raised. The smaller political parties in the ruling coalition began making speeches about defending the national heritage from rapacious foreigners as a way of irritating the larger group of Christian Democrats. At one stage, it had even seemed as though the socialists would pull out of the coalition, and that love of art would bring down the government – thus giving the country another unusual political first.

But it didn’t happen. The polizia, spotting a way of aggrandising itself at the expense of the rival carabinieri, proposed a national task force to combat the problem, and for once were backed up by their minister. And in due course they had chosen Bottando to run it, the call to duty rescuing him from the drudgery of fighting an unequal and losing battle against white-collar criminals and other semi-legitimate hoodlums in the financial waters of central Milan.

His return to Rome had been one of the great joys of his career, and he had spent endless evenings walking the streets, revisiting old and favourite sites like the Imperial remains in the Forum, the quietly confident medieval churches and the extravagant baroque monuments. He was free to wander at his leisure, and blessed the bachelor status which permitted it.

As he and Flavia walked now, he constantly looked around him, and took his assistant on a slightly devious route to their destination. The case they were on was not so urgent that five minutes would make any difference. It was one of those Roman spring mornings which turns the city, for all its traffic jams, noise and untidiness, into a place of magic. The ochre buildings stood out against a clear blue sky, the smells of coffee and of food drifted out of bars and restaurants, there was a hum of preparation as the crisp and immaculate waiters set out tables and chairs in small piazzas, talking incessantly as they clipped the fresh white tablecloths in place and arranged flowers in the miniature vases. A few tourists were in evidence, looking tired as usual and dressed in the crumpled clothes and backpacks that were their invariable uniform. But there were not many; the year was too young, and the annual invasion was still several weeks away. For the time being, Rome was for the Romans, and it seemed like very heaven.

The way to their destination lay through the middle of the Campo dei Fiori market. East of this ran the via Giubbonari, a thin, straight lane lined with clothes and shoe shops behind the ruins of Pompey’s Theatre. It was far too narrow for any sort of car, but nonetheless several Fiats were wedged halfway down it, horns honking as the pedestrians did their best to make their way past. Just beyond these, in a small passageway on the left that was lined with second-hand booksellers, was Santa Barbara.

It was a tiny church, unvisited even by Bottando. It appeared virtually derelict, and was small enough to look almost like a model. Unlike the great basilicas of the city, this was very much a parish church. Built probably in the seventeenth century, its design was entirely conventional, the sort of thing that even an attentive tourist would pass by without bothering to visit.

The first view of the inside confirmed that the tourist would probably have been correct in his decision. The ceiling was of plain greyish plasterwork, there were no chapels along the side and the decorations were commonplace. Nonetheless, it still gave Bottando that brief moment, as his body registered the coolness of the interior, his nose caught the faint smell of old incense, and his eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, that always made him delight in visiting even the most modest of Rome’s churches. Like nearly all small churches, there was something sad, neglected, but entirely welcoming about Santa Barbara. The one discordant note was that someone, evidently the priest, had decided to erect a modern altar, which stood out brashly in the old and worn building. Bottando heard Flavia sniff with disapproval.

‘Modern priests trying to drum up fresh trade,’ she commented.

‘Maybe,’ Bottando replied. ‘I suppose in this area you have to do something. It would be a pity to wake up one day and find that your entire congregation had died of old age.’

‘I suppose so. But I’ve never got on with hairy-chested clerical enthusiasm. The intense beady look in their eyes always makes me uncomfortable. Give me corpulent corruption any day.’

Bottando began to remark that he would never have thought she was interested in priests. He was trying to push his mind off the subject of his own little paunch, and the worry that this signified decadence in his assistant’s mind, when the subject of their discussion came through a small door behind the old altar.

At first sight, he didn’t fit the caricature of the tall, gaunt, jesuitical type that Flavia evidently had in mind. He didn’t look at all like the sort who spend a few years doing good in the suburbs before rushing off to upset the Pope by running guns in South America. Short, pink and fleshy of face, he seemed more inclined to stay in Rome with a cosy sinecure in the Vatican. But, thought Bottando, you never can tell with priests. At least his greeting when Bottando introduced himself was courteous.

‘I gather that you have lost a painting,’ the policeman began once the preliminary polite noises were over. ‘As I have been told it might have been stolen, I thought I had better make some enquiries.’

The priest frowned, cupping his hands together in front of his stomach in a gesture of clerical thoughtfulness. ‘I can’t imagine who told you that. There used to be an altar painting, true. But we sold it a month or so ago.’

‘Sold it? To whom? Isn’t that church property? I thought these sales normally went through the Vatican. They generally tell us about them.’

The priest looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, it’s like this.’ He paused. ‘Do you have to make a report or something? I really don’t want to get into a bureaucratic muddle over forms and things.’

‘It all depends. We’ve been told that a painting here was stolen. The niceties of Vatican routine are not our concern if it wasn’t.’

‘It wasn’t.’ He thought for a moment, then launched into an explanation. ‘I run a small programme for the addicts who live in the Campo area – food, shelter, some attempts to keep them off drugs, and awake.’ Bottando nodded and politely encouraged him to get on with it. He had come across dozens of these individual programmes in Milan, generally run by well-meaning priests. As a rule, they didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the problem, but the state provided no better alternative.

‘We need a lot of supplies and, as you can see, it’s a poor parish. We don’t get any donations from visitors, not a penny from the diocese, nothing from the city. About a month ago a man appeared and wanted to buy the altarpiece. He offered enough money to keep the programme going for a year and I took it. The sale wasn’t registered with the Vatican because it would have taken most of the money. I decided that my addicts needed it more.’

Bottando nodded again. It happened all the time and was understandable, even if it did make his job more difficult. ‘How much did he pay?’ he asked.

‘Ten million lire,’ the priest replied. ‘I knew all about the painting. It’s virtually worthless. I told him so, but he said it was for a collector who wanted a piece by Mantini and was prepared to pay over the odds for it.’

‘Did he give you a receipt or anything like that?’

‘Oh yes, it was all done properly. The deed of sale was even franked properly. If you will wait I’ll get it.’ He hurried back to the sacristy and returned a few moments later with a large piece of white, lined paper with a stamp in the top-right corner. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Sold, One Reposo by Mantini from the Church of Santa Barbara, Rome, for ten million lire. Dated 15 February and signed by myself and Edward Byrnes, dealer. I see he gave no address. I’d not noticed that before. But he paid me in cash and gave me a donation for the programme as well, so I suppose that doesn’t matter much.’

2

At about eight that evening, Flavia di Stefano sighed, dumped the remainder of her work, finished and unfinished, in the ‘out’ basket and walked briskly out of the office. It had been a busy day, and not a particularly satisfying one.

After the visit to Santa Barbara, the rest of her day had been taken up with routine enquiries about the Mantini, all of them frustrating for someone who loved finding corruption in high places. Everything about the transaction was entirely legal. The owner had wanted to sell, the buyer had taken the picture to England and had been scrupulous about informing everybody of his intentions. All the forms had been filled in properly, and every legal obstacle with the arts ministry, the treasury and the customs surmounted by the rulebook.

A model of a respectable art dealer in operation. Except that Sir Edward Byrnes, prince of London art dealers, might have been taking a Raphael out rather than some piece of junk. But an afternoon spent combing through the penal code had produced nothing which gave them a case. If Byrnes had painted over the Raphael and concealed the fact, a clear crime. If he had smuggled it out, ditto. If he had stolen it, no trouble. In all those cases they could probably have recovered the picture. But, as far as she could tell, there was nothing against taking out a Raphael covered with a Mantini, if you were not the one who’d put the Mantini over it in the first place. And Byrnes would say he didn’t know there was anything special about the picture at all. He’d be lying through his teeth, of course, but nothing could be done about it.

It was annoying. Doubly annoying, in fact. Flavia took it for granted that all art dealers were crooked at some level. Their business, after all, consisted of buying things that they knew the sellers could get more for elsewhere. Byrnes, however, was an absolute model of propriety. Utterly fluent in Italian, he often donated works to Italian museums and lent other pieces for exhibitions. His services in other matters had been rewarded with honours in Italy and France, as well as with his knighthood. By reputation a distinguished and learned man, there was not a trace of his ever having even bent the rules, let alone broken them. It was infuriating and, to Flavia, merely demonstrated that he was too clever to get caught.

It was also annoying because the Italian woman, in this if not much else, was patriotic. For hundreds of years the rest of the world had picked over Italy and removed its greatest art treasures. Nowhere in Italy now was there a museum that compared with the National Galleries in London or Washington, or the Louvre in Paris. Many paintings only remained in Italy because they were stuck on to the walls, though she had even heard that one American millionaire in the twenties had offered to buy the church in Assisi so that the Giotto frescos decorating it could be shipped back to Arizona. For Italians to lose a Raphael was dreadful, even if they had not even known they had it.

Grumbling thus to herself, Flavia walked quickly along the streets, heading towards the Piazza Navona. She had agreed to meet her erstwhile prisoner for dinner, so she could go over some of the details of his story in an atmosphere that might make him more forthcoming. Not that she thought Argyll had been lying. But an interrogation by the police after a night in the cells often makes people forget little details.

The hurry was because she had almost forgotten. As she walked, she checked her handbag; the strap around her neck, Roman fashion, to guard against pickpockets. There was enough to pay for dinner for two. She had a feeling that her fellow-diner was short of funds, and taking men out to dinner always gave her an agreeable feeling. Her mother would never have gone out with a man on her own. Although she was a liberal sort of mother and countenanced such behaviour in her youngest, the idea of her daughter paying would still have shocked her greatly.

She had arranged to meet her guest at a nearby trattoria. It was not a particularly special one, but near to her apartment, and reliable. Like most Roman eating establishments, it served wonderful pasta, magnificent antipasti and dreadful main courses. Unlike Turin, which really knew what meat was, Romans seemed satisfied with any sort of boot leather. No matter: she was used to it now. But Roman food was still about the only thing that made her nostalgic for her home town.

Argyll was sitting at a table in the corner and waved cautiously at her as she entered. Ordinarily he would have been good-enough looking, in an English sort of way, not that that sort of thing normally appealed much to her. Tallish, fair-haired, conservatively and not very well-dressed by Italian standards. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, were his hands, which were long and delicate. He had wrung them together incessantly during the formal interview. They looked as though they would have been better employed playing the violin, or something. At least, he didn’t now seem to be twitching and fiddling so much.

Being freed from temporary incarceration indeed seemed to have done him good, and Flavia remarked on the fact.

‘For someone who has just mislaid a Raphael you seem remarkably cheerful,’ she said.

He beamed at her. ‘I suppose so. By rights I ought to be dreadfully depressed. On the other hand, of course, the whole business proves I’m right, even though it wasn’t quite the type of public acclaim I’d had in mind. Besides which, being arrested by the police is quite interesting, in an odd sort of way.’

‘They didn’t treat you badly, then?’

‘Not at all. Charming people. They even let me go out for lunch, as long as I promised to be back in my cell in three hours. I can’t see the boys in blue in London operating in quite such a free and easy fashion.’

‘I imagine that by then they’d decided you weren’t a public menace. Didn’t the whole business upset you at all, though?’

‘Well, yes, it did,’ Argyll replied, tucking in to his plate of pasta. ‘It wasn’t what I’d imagined at all. I rather saw myself uncovering the picture and making a grand announcement – after warning the parish priest – in some suitably scholarly magazine. Great sensation. Career made, one happy parish priest and the whole world one Raphael the richer.’

He was speaking in Italian, which he spoke with some fluency. Not perfect by any means, and heavily accented, but more than acceptable. Flavia always believed in speaking Italian to foreigners if possible. Not many of them could, and those who tried could usually only manage phrases culled from guidebooks and street signs, but she felt she should make them practise. She herself had spent years learning English, and saw no reason why others shouldn’t make a similar effort.

‘But now we have one very unhappy parish priest, an even more unhappy Vatican, Byrnes with the picture, and your career very far from made,’ she pointed out. ‘You’re sure that there’s something under it?’

‘I wasn’t at all sure, that’s why I wasted so much money to come here and check. It took me months to get enough to buy the ticket. And I couldn’t check it because it wasn’t there any more. I was just standing around wondering what to do next. And before I could make up my mind, those flatfooted policemen of yours saw the door was open and collared me. But,’ he added, ‘I’m sure there is now. Someone like Byrnes wouldn’t pull off a stunt like this unless he knew it was worthwhile.’

‘What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just write to the priest months ago, tell him your idea, and get permission to have the painting examined. Then he wouldn’t have sold it until it had all been cleared up.’

‘Oh, that’s simple. I’m an idiot. And an apprentice academic as well, which is worse.’ Argyll looked gloomy, put his fork down, the idea clearly having made him lose his appetite. ‘Art history, as you probably know, is a nasty, vicious profession. I reckoned that if I said a word to anyone in Italy, some big shot in the Museo Nazionale would get there first and take the credit. That’s happened before, and who could resist the temptation? It would’ve been the greatest find for years.’

‘It still will be,’ added Flavia a little unnecessarily, dealing a further savage blow to his appetite.

‘Thank you,’ he replied.

Flavia looked at him sympathetically. By all accounts all he’d wanted was a little bit of fame, a small boost to a career in a desperately overcrowded profession. And even that had been snatched from his grasp by Byrnes’s desperate desire for even more money than he already had. ‘Can’t you just write the article anyway? And why tell Byrnes in the first place? You haven’t exactly been playing the master tactician through all this, but that seems the daftest course you could possibly have taken.’

‘I didn’t tell him,’ Argyll said indignantly. ‘I may be dim, but I’m not that bad. I haven’t told a soul. Well, except my supervisor. I had to tell him. But he’s awfully discreet, hates art dealers and has been incommunicado in Tuscany ever since. Can’t possibly have been Tramerton. Nice man really,’ he continued, going off at a conversational tangent. ‘I suppose I should send him a letter about all this. Going to jail to forward historical knowledge should impress even him.

‘As for my article…Well, I will write one. But I’ll have to do something a bit faster to stake my claim. It takes months to get a piece in a decent journal. By the time it came out, everybody would be sick of hearing about bloody Raphael. The moment Byrnes is sure he’s got the right picture, the press will be called in. Sensational discovery, the works. His tame academics will write glowing articles about translucent masterpieces. And when the enthusiasm reaches its peak, the damn thing will move to Christie’s.’

Argyll paused as the waiter brought the next course, which he looked at with distaste. ‘And every museum, every loony millionaire in the world, will be there to bid,’ he went on. ‘Something like the Getty would mortgage its grandmother to have it. Can you imagine what sort of price it will fetch? It will make a bunch of sunflowers by Van Gogh seem bargain basement.’

‘Why so much? It’s not as if Raphaels are thin on the ground. He churned out dozens of pictures.’

‘I know, and they’re all in museums or painted on the walls of the Vatican. There hasn’t been a real one on the market for decades. Let alone a new one discovered. It’s all supply and demand. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be very good, it’ll still fetch a fortune. Especially with a story like this attached to it.’

‘Not a bad return on a ten million-lire investment.’

‘That’s what he paid?’ Argyll paused to consider the iniquities of the world. ‘That makes it even worse. Even I could have raised that much. Well, almost, anyway.’

He had a well developed, if somewhat morbid, sense of humour, Flavia noted. He was also self-deprecating and appeared to be intelligent, despite apparently deliberate attempts to hide the fact. From being a simple business venture, the meal was turning into a moderately enjoyable occasion.

‘Tell me,’ began her guest in an ostentatious attempt to change the subject, and demonstrate that he wasn’t entirely obsessed with errant masterpieces, ‘What’s your job like? Plenty of work? Job satisfaction?’

She grimaced. ‘Certainly plenty of work. It’s like living under a permanent avalanche. Someone or other calculated that one work disappears every ten minutes. It’s amazing there’s anything left to steal.’

Argyll observed that, so far, Italy seemed to have plenty left.

‘That’s just the trouble. There seems to be an almost infinite amount kept in tumbledown country churches and half-abandoned houses. It keeps vanishing, and often as not the thefts aren’t even reported.’

Argyll discovered to his delight that Flavia smoked, so fished out his own crumpled packet and lit up. ‘Why not? What’s the objection to reporting a theft?’

She counted the points off on her fingers as she spoke. ‘One: basic distrust of the police. Two: conviction that we won’t get it back anyway. Three: desire to stop the authorities knowing what else they have in case it gets taxed. Four: threats. What do you think? If I had to choose between a painting and my ears, I think I’d also choose to wave goodbye to the painting.’

It was not a bad evening. Argyll listened with every appearance of genuine interest in what she had to say, which made a nice change from the usual sort of meal where she was expected to listen with open-mouthed admiration as her date for the evening demonstrated his great qualities. He also had a fund of miscellaneous anecdotes and kept his end of the conversation going. There was only one minor incident after she had paid the bill in the restaurant when, with his hands between his knees, and rocking forward and backward slightly in an agonised fit of embarrassment, Argyll had squinted at the ceiling and said, ‘I don’t suppose…’ and then paused, and smiled foolishly.

By Italian standards it scarcely counted as an advance: one ardent suitor had only been stopped when Flavia smacked him in the face with a handy frying pan. But she had met enough Englishmen to realise what was intended, even if the technique was so reticent as to make the suggestion almost unnoticeable. Fortunately, dealing with the problem was easy: she had smiled back, and suggested an ice-cream. It seemed to be a more than suitable alternative, and the offer was accepted with evident relief.

They finished off the evening by taking a turn twice round the Piazza Montecitorio before heading for Giolitti’s. Flavia was Italian and Argyll had spent enough time in the country to accept that a day without an ice-cream was a day wasted. And slowly eating it while walking the streets along with the rest of the population was a good way of restoring faith that the world was an essentially benevolent place, despite all the recent evidence to the contrary.

3

Argyll swung in through a door in the via Condotti and mounted the stairs. He walked quickly past the janitor at the bottom, waving in a familiar sort of style. He should, properly, have shown the card which proved he was entitled to visit Rome’s foreign press club. As he didn’t have one, that was difficult. Janitors in Rome, anyway, don’t often care too much about minor details.

He headed for the bar, an unattractive, tubular steel and artificial wood affair, sat down and ordered an aperitif. Then he looked around and spotted his quarry. Rudolf Beckett could be seen in the next room, alone at a table, eating a late lunch. A large glass of whisky rested in front of him. Argyll walked over and sat down.

‘Jonathan. What brings you back to Rome?’ Beckett thumped him on the shoulder with one hand, and shook his hand vigorously with the other. He had become one of Argyll’s closest friends during his stay in Rome a year or so back. They had run into each other at a minor diplomatic party on the via Giulia. Both had felt out of place, so had naturally spent much of the evening drinking their host’s alcohol and being rude about the guests. Afterwards they had gone on to a bar nearby and drunk some more. It had cemented the friendship.

Not that they had anything in common. Argyll was a quiet and somewhat introverted Englishman, Beckett an aggressive workaholic with a permanent shake derived from too much drink, too little sleep, and all-consuming neuroses about the next story, the next cheque and whether anybody really liked him. As Argyll clearly did, he had never borne the brunt of one of the tumultuous outbursts of rage that made Beckett’s colleagues a little wary of his company.

‘Wild geese,’ he replied to the greeting. ‘I’ve just been let out of jail.’

Beckett suppressed a smirk.

‘No jokes, please,’ he continued, to head off the quip that the journalist was obviously on the verge of uttering. ‘I’m not resilient enough yet. I was wondering if you wanted a nice story.’

‘Is the Pope Catholic? Course I do. Depending on what it is. As long as you remember I can’t pay anything for it.’

‘I don’t want anything like that. To see it in print would be enough.’

Argyll then retold the story of his discovery and the incursion of Sir Edward Byrnes, ending with his night in the cell. ‘My discovery. Pinched. Just like that. Could you write something so everyone knows what really happened? Otherwise Byrnes will get all the credit as well as all the money.’

‘Nice story,’ commented Beckett, finishing off another whisky and moving straight on to a large grappa. ‘But the lead is the Raphael, not your being diddled. However, an expert hack like myself will be able to do it. Great discovery, famous artist, etc., etc. Then a bit of stuff about you further down, undermining the whole thing and making Byrnes out to be a proper toad. Easy.

‘You’ll forgive me, though, but I must check up on the story first. A few phone calls, here and there, that sort of thing. OK? Feel better? You don’t look as though you’ve been greatly enjoying the eternal city.’

‘I haven’t. The only good thing that’s happened so far has been having dinner with that policewoman last night…’

‘That does sound bad.’

‘Not at all. She’s very lovely. Remarkably lovely, in fact. As I’ve got to go back to London tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter, though.’

As Beckett explained in a letter a few weeks later, it wasn’t really his fault, and he sent his original article to prove it. He had written the story as promised: revelation about a possible new Raphael, attributed to ‘museum sources’; a quotation of cautious optimism from Byrnes, a few comments from a couple of art historians, then some quite well-researched background about other remarkable discoveries in the past few years. From there on, Beckett had written about Argyll and had clearly and concisely got the message across. Young graduate student cheated by machinations of sly dealer. It didn’t actually say that, of course, but the general implication was crystal clear. It was a good article.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too good. He had sent it off to the editor of his paper in New York and this man had been excited by it. So it had gone on the front page, left side, single column, instead of in the arts section as Beckett had expected. But it was a busy time of year. A summit meeting was in the offing, another bribery and corruption scandal had broken out among local politicians, the administration was indulging in another spate of Libya-bashing. The editor hadn’t wanted to run the story over on to an inside page. So he made it fit by cutting it down a bit, and had sliced off the bottom seven paragraphs. With these went all mention of Argyll.

In every other respect, the article worked wonders, and stimulated enormous public interest. Over the next few months, all of Argyll’s predictions to Flavia about the Raphael came true. The story of the eighteenth-century fraud and its discovery captured the imagination. The New York Times colour supplement, and the arts supplement of the London Observer, duly carried lengthy accounts of the art-historical detective work which had led to the pot of gold. They, also, neglected to mention Argyll, but were otherwise solidly written. Byrnes’s sales campaign was well under way.

Argyll indulged his sense of mild masochism by collecting the articles. All sorts of critics and historians invaded what he had previously considered to be his turf. The diligent research of others produced dozens of little fragments to complete his partial picture and show the results of his haste. One article reproduced letters from the Earl’s brother-in-law indicating he had died of a heart attack from shock at the fraud, and that the family had covered up their loss for fear of embarrassment: ‘Rest assured, dear sister, no fault attaches to you for the attack. Such an event was entirely due to his own injudicious choice and hasty character. But these matters will remain between us alone; the disgrace to our family, and the scorn of certain of our friends could not be tolerated…’ That particularly outraged him. He had seen the same letter, but had decided it was inconclusive. Now everything else was clear, so was the letter.

What was worse was that all these little articles meant that even the modest piece he had planned for the Burlington Magazine was not possible; everything had already been published at least once. He avoided his friends and found a peculiar form of solace in going back to the Life and Times of Carlo Mantini, 1675-1729. At least he could finish that. It wouldn’t be so good now that one of his central chapters had become about as original as the plot of Romeo and Juliet, but it would do.

He was also correct in assuming that Byrnes, one of nature’s salesmen despite his mild manner, would turn the whole process of cleaning and restoration into a media event. The best restorers from the museums were called in to scrape away the paintwork of Mantini and remove the layer of protective varnish over the precious object underneath. Almost every week, bulletins on television would show the team of white-coated professionals – half scientific, half artistic – applying a variety of exotic solvents that could be relied upon to do their appointed task and no more. Then yet more programmes and articles in magazines monitored the second cleaning process, which would restore the painting to its original perfection.

Almost everybody knew by now that underneath the painting by Mantini there lay a portrait of Elisabetta di Laguna, the mistress of an earlier Marchese di Parma and, by repute, the most beautiful woman of her age. What someone like Raphael, who had made much less attractive women look like veritable Venuses, would have produced with such a sitter was anybody’s guess. Critics from the London Standard to the Baltimore Sun speculated freely. Some even ventured to suggest that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa would be knocked off its perch as the world’s favourite painting.

While the picture was under wraps, the jockeying for position got under way amongst the likely buyers. The Louvre indicated its interest, if it could afford the price. Two large New York banks and three pension funds in Tokyo also let it be known they might attend the auction. In an attempt to frighten off the opposition, the Getty Museum in Malibu Beach hinted that it might unleash all its vast buying-power to take possession. And all over the world, lesser millionaires and billionaires assessed their position, counted their money and attempted to work out whether they could, in a few years, sell it for a profit. Many decided they could.

When the picture was finally revealed to the public, the event was stage-managed in exquisite detail. The unveiling took place in a large meeting-room at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand, and hundreds of people were invited. The picture stood on a raised platform, covered with a large white sheet. Before the great moment, a presentation was made to the assembled press, television cameras, dignitaries from the worlds of museum and art-history faculties. The senior curator of the Louvre sat alongside the local staffer from Associated Press and the great Japanese collector Yagamoto; while the keeper of western art from the Dresdener Staatsgalerie was sandwiched between his great rival from one of the richest museums in the American Midwest and a sweaty individual from one of the London tabloids.

All of them had been served with champagne, courtesy of Byrnes Galleries, and all listened with appropriate attention as Byrnes himself ran through the now well-known story of how the painting was discovered; long forgotten in the little church in central Rome, and covered by another painting as a result of one of the greatest artistic fraud attempts of all time. Byrnes did a competent job of it, but was far from coming across as the archetype of the smooth art dealer. A small, timid-looking man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a bald head which ducked and bobbed nervously as he spoke, he was not at all like most people’s image of an international aesthete.

Nor, to Flavia in the fifteenth row on the right, did he look like the Machiavellian beast of Jonathan Argyll’s evidently fevered imagination. She was there largely out of curiosity; the presentation having come during one of her visits to London for informal discussions with the London art squad.

Flavia had gently asked her opposite number in London to organise an invitation. The squad was out in force to guard the picture, and Byrnes could hardly refuse them. So she sat and listened to him making his concluding remarks. Then he introduced Professor Julian Henderson, doyen of Renaissance studies, who gave a brief lecture. The picture, he told them, in an eminently polished delivery, was, without doubt, Raphael’s masterpiece; the apogee of the Humanist ideal of feminine beauty.

The lecture hall was not one that the journalists in the audience were used to, but they listened politely, and the photographers got on with their business. Henderson concluded by comparing the picture to other portraits by Raphael, and suggesting that the evidence now indicated that Elisabetta had been the model for the portrait of Sappho in the mural of Parnassus in the Vatican. The new work that the discovery would engender was enough to keep historians of the Italian High Renaissance in business for years.

Amid minor laughter and light applause he sat down and Byrnes moved towards the picture.

Flavia was beginning to find the showbiz style of the meeting a little wearisome, and was glad that Byrnes avoided any excessive display in the final stages. Not that it was needed; the audience’s sense of anticipation needed no further stimulation. With only a minor flourish, the cover was gently removed, and there was a quiet gasp as the onlookers, and the cameras, focused on what had become one of the most famous paintings in the world.

Because of the incessant coverage it had received in the last few months, almost everyone had some idea what the portrait looked like. Seeing it in the flesh was nonetheless exhilarating. It was a beautiful painting of a very beautiful woman. From her position, Flavia could not see very well, but it seemed to be a bust length with the head turned slightly to the right. Fair hair was gathered loosely at the back of the head so that the left ear was partly covered. The left hand reached up to touch a necklace, and the subject was dressed in a close-fitting dress of a gorgeously rich red. The background was conventional, but excellently produced. The sitter – lean and with none of the fleshy appearance that made many of Raphael’s Madonnas look just a little overweight – was in a room. In the left background was a window giving out to a wooded hill, on the right, wall hangings, a table and some ornaments. The organisation of the figure itself radiated an air of remarkable tranquillity, with just a hint of the sensuality that the painter so often brought out.

But she was most struck by the reaction from the audience. They were not admiring the delicacy of the brush strokes, the masterly application of shading or the subtleties of the composition, that was certain. They were ogling. Not a usual reaction for connoisseurs. She herself was caught up in the enthusiasm. The picture, both in its history and subject, was extraordinarily romantic. This most beautiful woman, nearly half a millennium old, had been lost for nearly three hundred years. It could hardly fail to capture the imagination. She even felt herself forgiving Byrnes.

∗ ∗ ∗

The enthusiasm that greeted Elisabetta’s entry onto the world scene after her long absence carried the painting right through to the auction, held in the main sale room of Christie’s about a month later. That affair also lived up to expectations.

The auctioneers knew how to put on a show. Expensively printed catalogues with full-colour photographs, a satellite link to sale rooms in Switzerland, New York and Tokyo, live television coverage in eight countries; these were the most obvious signs that an event of great importance was taking place. The atmosphere in the room, casually lined with other works of lesser significance, was electrifying. Like all good salesmen, the auctioneers had style. The sale was officially dubbed only ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century old master oils and drawings’, and Elisabetta was humbly placed as number twenty-eight on the list. The only difference was that, unlike many of the other lots, the Raphael had not been given an estimated sale price.

The audience had risen to the occasion also. London auctions range widely in style, background and purpose. At one end, there are the routine sales held in the shabby auction rooms in insalubrious neighbourhoods like Marylebone where the main clientele are unshaven dealers who congregate to chat, eat sandwiches, and pick up paintings for a couple of hundred pounds.

At the very top of the pile are the great houses in St James, where uniformed doormen open the broad brass doors, the employees speak with the accents of the privileged, and the clientele look as if they could buy a few hundred thousand pounds-worth of oil painting and not even notice. Even here, however, dealers tend to predominate, but these are the princes of their trade, with galleries in Bond Street or Fifth Avenue or the Rue de Rivoli. They are the sort of people who have enough to live on for a year if they sell one painting every three months, who own firms – not companies and never shops – that were often founded a century or more before. Not that this made them any more honest and less likely to break the law if necessary, but they generally did so more cautiously, more intelligently, and with greater decorum.

Like their clients, they knew how to behave appropriately. In the audience of maybe three hundred people, all but a dozen of the men wore their dinner jackets. The women, outnumbered around four to one, were dressed to match, with most in long ball gowns or wearing furs – until the heat of the camera lights made them intolerable. The air vibrated with the smell of a hundred mingling perfumes.

The sense of anticipation built up slowly as the lots were brought to the rostrum and the bidding started. A Maratta was sold for three hundred thousand pounds – the price instantly clicked up on the display board in four countries translated into dollars, Swiss francs and yen – and no one paid any attention. An Imperiali fetching a record price excited no interest whatsoever. Lot twenty-seven, a particularly fine old Palma oil-sketch which deserved greater consideration, was knocked down at an absurdly low price and bought in.

Then came Lot twenty-eight. The auctioneer, a man in his sixties who had seen it all before, knew well that the best way to generate excitement and loosen wallets was an utterly deadpan presentation. The slightest sign of enthusiasm or an apparent wish to manipulate the audience with a show of salesmanship would produce entirely the wrong effect. Understatement is always a virtue in such situations. As he spoke, two young men in brown overalls brought the picture and hung it on the easel to the right of the rostrum. It stood there, bathed in light – as one poetic television reporter put it afterwards – as if it were back on an altar as an object of worship itself.

‘Lot twenty-eight. Raphael. A portrait of Elisabetta di Laguna, about 1505. Oil on canvas, sixty-eight centimetres by a hundred and thirty-eight. I’m sure many of you know the background to this work, so we will start the bidding at twenty million pounds. What am I bid?’

To start the bidding at such a high price was audacious, but just the right touch of muted flamboyance needed. Only a few years ago to have ended the session on such a figure would have been a sensation. Only four pictures in the world had ever fetched more. Without any noise, and without any member of the audience appearing to move at all, the bidding flashed past thirty million, then thirty-five, then forty. At forty-two million, some dealers manning a rank of telephones along one side of the room spoke to their clients in dozens of different countries. At fifty-three million, some put down their phones and folded their arms, signifying that their clients had pulled out. At fifty-seven million it was clear that the bidding was down to two people, a burly man in the third row who insiders knew had acted in the past for the Getty Museum, and a small man who made his bids with a nervous gesture with his hand, chopping sideways briefly as though making a point in an animated conversation.

It was this second man who won. After he had offered sixty-three million pounds, the burly man with the purple cravat looked up, hesitated and then shook his head. There was silence for perhaps three seconds.

‘Sold. For sixty-three million pounds. Yours, sir.’

The room exploded in applause, the tension welling up suddenly then bursting into relief and euphoria. It was not only a record, but an enormous record. The only reservation in the minds of the professional part of the audience was who the buyer had been. The art world is a small universe and almost everyone in it knows everyone else and who they work for.

No one had the slightest idea who this man was, and he vanished through a side door before anybody could ask him.

4

It took only a few days before the word seeped through the secret passages riddling the world of dealers, connoisseurs and collectors that the small unknown man who had outbid the Getty was a senior civil servant in the Italian treasury, sent to the sale with a blank cheque from the government and instructions to get the work at any cost. The news itself caused another mild stir. Like most other state museums, the Italian system was given an annual budget that was wholly inadequate. Like the curators of every museum in Europe, the director of the Museo Nazionale had had to stand by, consumed by a mixture of rage and envy, as work after precious work reached prices that his entire budget for the next twelve months could not have covered. But he was a man who regarded the saving of works for Italy as a moral duty, and had been lobbying everyone in authority for months to set aside more funds. He had won his point and, when Elisabetta came up for sale, had cajoled and fought for the government to honour its promises.

Clearly, some remarkable manoeuvring had been going on in the labyrinthine and obscure network of intrigue known as the Italian government. In fact, it was another example of politics at work. The interest that the portrait had generated elsewhere in the world was nothing compared to that seen in Italy itself. The way that a cunning English dealer had snatched Elisabetta from the hands of State and Vatican, and had legally evaded all the restrictions designed to stop such an event, made the government appear foolish, the museum curators slow-witted, and the art historians incompetent.

And several members of the government remembered the furore that had preceded the founding of Bottando’s sezione only a few years before. So the authorities gave way to the ferocious and persuasive lobbying, made available the special grant they had promised, and sent off their man. In some ways it was a daring thing to do: the opposition Communist Party instantly did its best to make capital out of the move by pointing to a dozen better ways of spending that sort of money. Others wrote polemical articles in the newspapers on the Italian budget deficit and how the country could not possibly afford such indulgences.

But the government, and particularly the arts minister, had calculated correctly. He posed as a champion of the Italian heritage, willing to defend the patrimony at all costs. If Italy had lost such a valuable painting, then it must have it back. If this cost money, then so be it; that amount would be paid to safeguard the nation’s artistic integrity. It turned out to be a popular move; opinion polls showed that the electorate’s patriotic nerve had been touched. Besides, there is something peculiarly gratifying in owning the most expensive picture in the world, and to have outspent the Americans and Japanese in a fair fight. Outside the country also, the Italian move was applauded. Directors from national museums everywhere cited the purchase as an example for their own governments to follow; some newspapers even began pointing to the minister – a man of little administrative ability and small intelligence – as embodying the sort of dynamism and vision that could make an effective prime minister.

Which didn’t endear him to the current incumbent, but as the government as a whole reaped some of the advantages of being considered effective, swift of foot and cultured – the last quality in some ways more important in Italy than the first two – nothing was said. But it was noted, and the minister was marked down for special attention in case he should show further signs of getting above himself.

The actual return of the painting was conducted like a state visit from a visiting sovereign. A month after the auction, once it had been put through a series of tests and examinations in London by specialists, it arrived in an air-force transport at Fiumicino airport and was carried in a procession – with attendant motorcycle outriders and armoured cars – to the National Museum. The armoured cars seemed a little excessive, but Bottando’s department, in liaison with his comrades in the regular army, was taking no chances. The Brigate Rosse, the urban guerillas of the seventies, had lain dormant for several years, but you never knew.

In the Museo Nazionale itself, Elisabetta was set up like an icon. A room was emptied to take the portrait which would rest, behind the rope barrier keeping viewers ten feet away, in solitary splendour. Again, caution prevailed. Both police and curators remembered the sledgehammer attack on Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s a few years before; too many pictures in recent years had been slashed with knives or peppered with pellets from shotguns by maniacs who claimed to be the archangel Gabriel, or resented the adulation of some long-dead artist while their own talents went unrecognised. And everyone agreed that the painting’s fame made it a perfect target for some deranged attention-seeker.

Finally, the room was bathed in subdued lighting, with a single spotlight illuminating the work. The museum’s interior designers freely admitted to their friends, if not to anybody else, that this was a bit melodramatic. Drawings, such as Leonardo’s Madonna in the National Gallery in London, actually needed such protection from light to preserve them. Oil paintings were much more resilient and could do perfectly well in natural light. But the effect was splendid, creating an atmosphere of almost religious awe and causing visitors to speak in respectful, hushed tones which added greatly to the work’s impact.

Visitors there were in abundance. In the first few months attendance at the museum doubled. A visit suddenly became almost compulsory not only for tourists – who had often left it out hitherto because of its inconvenient location out of the centre – but even for Romans themselves. Thousands of postcards were sold; Elisabetta di Laguna T-shirts were popular; a multi-national biscuit company paid the museum a fortune for the right to put her face on one of their products. Combined with the hugely increased entry fees, the museum directors calculated the state would have recovered most of the vast cost of the picture within four years if the painting’s popularity continued at this rate.

For Bottando and his assistant, the return of the painting had triggered one of their busiest periods for years. Setting up security, keeping tabs on known national and international thieves, worrying lest anything should go wrong, chained them to their desks.

Bottando, looking at the work through the eyes of an old-time policeman whose budget was already not big enough, spent much of his time in a frenzy of anxiety. He knew perfectly well that, whatever the picture’s artistic merits, it was a painted time-bomb for his department. If anything should happen to it, the blame would move around the government with the speed of a ball in a pinball machine before coming to rest on his desk.

Much of his work, therefore, consisted of preparing his defences. Although not a cynical man, and no politician, he was no fool either. A lifetime’s work under the aegis of the ministry of defence had taught him a great deal about survival techniques in a world that made fighting in the army seem genteel and civilised. So he spent many hours sweating over cautiously worded reports, drafted and redrafted memoranda and wasted a great deal of time taking a few, carefully selected, bureaucrats and politicians to dinner.

The result was not entirely to his liking, but better than nothing. He had lobbied for extra manpower, using Elisabetta as a way of making his case for a larger budget. In fact, the result was that the security staff of the Museo Nazionale was doubled. Although it was never stated directly, the effective conclusion was that his department was relieved of any responsibility for guarding the picture once it was hung.

This provided some protection. But Bottando realised, with a perception honed by years of watching for trouble, that there existed no official document proving his lack of responsibility, and that was worrying. Especially because in Cavaliere Marco Ottavio Mario di Bruno di Tommaso, the sublimely aristocratic director of the National Museum, he was dealing with a man who would have been a natural politician had he not gone into the museum business. A smoother operator, in fact, was not to be found in the Camera dei Deputati. Tommaso had had a painting snatched from under his very nose, had been forced to buy it back at an outrageous price, and had turned it into a triumph. Impressive, without a doubt.

He was reminded of the justice of this opinion as he stood talking to the director at a reception thrown to celebrate the picture’s installation in the museum. A very select junket indeed. A sizeable chunk of the cabinet and their inevitable hangers-on; museum folk, the occasional academic, a few journalists just so the affair would reach the papers. Tommaso was, if anything, Bottando’s superior in making sure glowing reports of his activities frequently adorned the pages of the newspapers.

‘Taking a bit of a risk, aren’t you? I mean, all these dubious types around your prized possession?’ Bottando gestured contemptuously at the justice minister and an army chief peering at the work, cigarettes in hand.

Tommaso moaned softly in agreement. ‘I know. But it’s difficult to ask the prime minister not to smoke. He gets withdrawal symptoms after ten minutes. We had to switch off all the fire alarms to make sure they weren’t all drenched by the sprinklers. Can’t say it makes me all that happy. But, there you are. What can you do? These people will insist on sharing the limelight.’ He shrugged.

The conversation dragged on for a few minutes more, and then Tommaso slid off to talk to others. He was always like that. Everybody got the regulation five minutes of urbane conversation. He was a perfect host; Bottando merely wished that he didn’t make you feel it all the time. He was always pleasant, always remembered everyone’s name, always recalled something about your last conversation with him to make you think he valued your company. Bottando hated him. The more so because he’d just sprung a very nasty surprise.

There was to be another liaison committee, he’d said. Were there not enough already, for heaven’s sake? A joint meeting of the museum and the police, to discuss security matters in the museum: Bottando heading the police end and Antonio Ferraro, the head of sculpture, the museum side. It had been Ferraro’s idea, apparently. Serve him right. Had Bottando heard about this in advance, he could have sabotaged the whole thing. But Tommaso had gone ahead, getting all the various approvals, before broaching the subject.

It was, of course, true that what this place did need was a long, hard look at its security procedures, which were neolithic. But a committee wasn’t going to achieve much and, in fact, it wasn’t intended to. Instead, Tommaso meant it to serve as a layer of protection between him and responsibility if anything should go wrong.

The only person Bottando felt sorry for was Ferraro, standing over on the other side of the room. Tall, broad, and powerful-looking. Dark hair, of the sort that clung to his scalp as though it had been heavily anointed with hair dressing. A voluble conversationalist, one of those who tends to interrupt you in mid-sentence so that he can continue his enthusiastic narrations. Mid-thirties, with a permanent look of mild sarcasm on his face. A clever, impatient man. No wonder he and Tommaso never got on well; neither was prepared to accept the other in anything but a subservient role. Maybe Bottando could have him replaced on the committee with someone a bit more amenable?

‘You’re scowling,’ said a voice by his side. ‘I deduce that you’ve just been talking to our beloved chief.’

Bottando turned around, and smiled. Enrico Spello was unofficially the deputy director and someone he had a certain liking for. ‘Right as usual. How did you guess?’

Spello clasped his hands together to indicate the mysteries of human intuition. ‘Simple. I always look like that after a conversation with Tommaso as well.’

‘But he’s your boss. You’ve a right to dislike him. He’s always pleasant to me.’

‘Of course. He’s always delightful to me, as well. Even when he’s cutting my budget by twenty-five per cent.’

‘He’s done that? When?’

‘Oh, it’s been going on for a year or more. No interest in the Etruscans any more. For archaeologists and antiquarians. What’s needed is more brightness, stuff to bring in the crowds. As you know, he’s a bit of a whizz kid, our Tommaso. My department gets sliced so he can afford some very expensive beige fabric on the walls of western art.’

‘Is yours the only department to be cut?’ Bottando asked.

‘Oh, no. But it’s one of the worst. It has lost our friend over there a lot of popularity.’ He smiled whimsically. Bottando felt for the man. He was a real scholar, the sort of person who was dying out in the museum world. He lived, breathed and slept Etruscan antiquities. No one knew more about those mysterious people than Spello. His sort were now being replaced by administrators, by fund raisers and by entrepreneurs. Not at all like the short, stout and eccentrically dressed Spello.

‘I didn’t know he had any popularity to lose,’ Bottando commented.

‘He didn’t really. I don’t know why he bothers. He’s got so much money he doesn’t have to.’

Bottando raised an eyebrow. ‘Indeed? I never knew that.’

Spello looked sideways at him. ‘And you call yourself a policeman? I thought you were meant to know everything. Vast family riches, so I’m told. Won’t do him any good. One day he’ll be found in his office with a knife in his back. Then you’ll be spoiled for suspects.’

‘Where should I start?’

‘Well,’ Spello began, considering the matter. ‘I trust you would do me the honour of making me top suspect. Then there’s the people in Non-Italian Baroque, who’ve been shunted into a tiny little attic where no one can ever find them. Impressionism doesn’t at all like his decision to merge them with Realism, and Glassware greatly resents the imperialistic designs of Silver. Quite a hornet’s nest, in fact. Our little dining-room resounds daily to tales of his outrages, past and present.’

‘And which past ones do you have in mind at the moment?’ Bottando prompted. He loved gossip, and realised Spello wanted to tell him some anecdote. Besides, he was irritated that he hadn’t known of the Tommaso money.

‘Ah. I was thinking of the Case of the Bum Correggio. This was back in the sixties, when our friend was keeper of pictures at Treviso. Nice museum, traditional starting place for One Who is Destined to Rise in the World. Being an ambitious and aggressive young man, Tommaso began to buy pictures from abroad, commandeering almost everyone else’s budget to do so.

‘He bought dozens of pictures and established his reputation as a thrusting up-and-comer. He likes buying pictures, you may have noticed. He alienated everyone else in the museum by doing so but, what the hell? He’d soon be moving on to better things.

‘But he made a false step. He bought a Correggio for a considerable amount of money, and hung it in the gallery. Then the whispers started. An article appeared, saying that on stylistic grounds it might not be genuine. Then some pieces of provenance were dredged up suggesting it was merely a copy. He forces the dealer – none other than Edward Byrnes – to take it back. But the storm over his competence continues, nonetheless.

‘This is where our friend’s genius comes in. His friends in Rome whisper into ears. He bludgeons his director – a sweet and naïve man – into taking the fire. The director resigns, and Tommaso, enhancing his reputation, resigns out of loyalty. He goes out into the wilderness for a brief period but is soon back, climbing the ladder to the stars. And there he is, in his firmament.

‘So you see,’ Spello added, looking around him at the now thinning room, ‘we may seem a happy family, but what a maelstrom of discontent is there. One mistake from our friend over there, and there’ll be a queue, half a kilometre long, waiting to tear his throat out.’

5

Despite the concern that the presence of Elisabetta continued to create, the work of the department had to go on as much as possible. If the public was entranced by the picture, the art thieves paused only momentarily before getting back to their proper business.

In fact, the furore might have encouraged more activity; with contemplation on the value and transportability of a small piece of canvas tempting more people to try their luck on other, less illustrious objects. This was tiresome, but in some ways satisfying, as the department’s success rate improved by picking up the amateurs. Removing an Italian statue or picture is often very simple, merely a question of breaking down an often frail door, loading the work into a car and driving off. Any second-rate crook can manage it. Getting rid of it afterwards, however, is a different matter. You can’t just take a hot painting in to a sale room and sell it, and if you want to pass it on to a dealer you have to know the honest ones from the dishonest ones. Successfully stealing works of art is a highly skilled occupation which, unlike many others, continues to breed practitioners of great ability.

It was because of the quiet but persistent activity of a master craftsman that several months after the arrival of Elisabetta in state to Rome, and once much of the excitement had died away to little more than an expanded inflow of income to the Museo Nazionale’s coffers, Flavia returned once more to London.

It was for yet another liaison meeting, a gathering of policemen from France, Italy, Greece and Britain, all brought together because of one man, thought to be French and suspected of running a thriving business in the theft of Greek icons.

Icons are relatively little known outside the art world, an obscure area that interests only the enthusiast. The pictures, generally on wooden panels and hung in Orthodox churches to assist the focusing of attention during prayer, are often difficult to appreciate. With simple backgrounds of gold, their stylised appearance is an acquired taste, especially as the absence of perspective makes them difficult for viewers brought up on the dynamism of the Renaissance. But once the taste is formed, they can become a passion, the stark elegance and uncluttered forms giving an aura of peacefulness and tranquillity which the more robust, active pieces produced in the West rarely approach.

More importantly, perhaps, they command high prices and the market for them is notably more crooked than for other types of art. Because one of the major sources is the Soviet Union, smuggling them is commonplace. Russian icons are also regularly brought out by émigrés who are forbidden to take out currency. They are smuggled to Vienna and on to Tel Aviv, then sent on to the market via New York and London. Buying them is cast almost as a blow for freedom, and few dealers or collectors worry themselves about their origin.

All these factors help create a market which Jean-Luc Morneau evidently found attractive – assuming that the deductions of the Sûrété were correct and that it was this Paris-based dealer who was behind the thefts. When the monastery on the island of Amorgos in the Cyclades contacted the local policeman, who in turn passed a message to Athens, which in due course made enquiries around Europe, Morneau’s name kept on appearing, although no hard evidence could be produced to warrant any sort of action.

Whoever it was, the technique used was simple. A tourist appears on the doorstep of the monastery asking to see the church. Once inside, he takes photographs, and particularly snaps away at the icon above the altar. He then thanks the monk at the gate, makes a donation and departs.

He returns many months later, sporting a beard, moustache or dark glasses to make recognition unlikely. He is again left to wander as he pleases. He checks to see the church is empty, goes up to the altar and unzips the large camera case. He takes out the copy he has painted from the photographs, swaps it for the genuine one over the altar and puts this carefully into his bag. He leaves the island on the next boat – the visit is timed so that the boat leaves only an hour or so afterwards – heads for Crete or Rhodes where airport customs are scarce, and flies out of the country.

The copy left behind on Amorgos, and on about twenty other islands, as well as a few sites in the north-east of Italy, is detected as a fake the moment that experts examine it. But it is very competent and quite able to withstand the normal scrutiny it receives, half-hidden in the semi-twilight of the church, from both monks and the occasional sightseer. According to the best recollection of the monks, it had done so for more than a year. Other monasteries had been admiring their copies for even longer.

The finger pointed to Morneau firstly because he was a dealer in icons, secondly because he had been trained as a painter, and thirdly because he was not known for his honesty. But, there the evidence had dried up, and the meeting had been called so that efforts could be directed towards tracking down some of the paintings by discreet enquiries.

The Greek police also wanted help in the search for Morneau, who had vanished from sight. French checks had established that he had vacated his studio in the Place des Abbesses some time ago. Without knowing where he was, it was that much more difficult to establish where he had been. Certainly the evidence of the monasteries was of little help; one reported the visitor with the camera case as French, others as Swedish, German, American and Italian. They had all failed to identify him from photographs.

The meeting to discuss the matter was largely inconclusive, mainly because one young and none-too-serious Englishman had sighed and ventured that he wished he could have thought of a crime like that. The remark irritated the Greeks, who had responded by making remarks about crooked French dealers, which sent the Gallic contingent into a sulk. The encounter, indeed, was no great symbol of European co-operation.

It was also as an indirect result of this somewhat inconclusive meeting that Flavia met Jonathan Argyll once more. He had written to her several months before, asking to see her if she should come to England, and saying that he wouldn’t mind returning the favour and taking her to dinner. She had not written back, partly because there had been no immediate plan to go to England, and partly because she hated writing letters; which, to her mind, made up a pretty good reason.

But evenings alone in big cities can be very dull, especially when the days are short, the weather is cold and the rain, as always in London, is coming down in a light, but persistent drizzle. It was impossible to walk around either to see sights or to window-shop. Going to restaurants on your own has little attraction, the cinemas weren’t showing anything that interested her, the one play she wanted to see was booked solid and the thought of a lonely evening in a hotel room with an improving book made those little twinges of imminent depression noticeable.

So, having exhausted all other possibilities, she picked up the phone and gave him a ring. He was instantly delighted to hear her, and invited her to go and eat immediately. She accepted, and he suggested she come round to his flat. This she considered, assessed for possible trouble, and refused. Even Englishmen could act funny when in their own apartments and, while she had no doubts about her ability to deal with any awkward situation, it always ruined an evening.

‘Oh go on. I’m not sure which restaurant to go to and it would be much easier if you came here first. It’s not very far from the tube.’

A sort of uncalculating friendliness in his request made her change her mind. She agreed to meet him at his flat at seven-thirty, was given directions, and put down the phone.

Getting to Notting Hill Gate from her hotel was easy. On the whole, Flavia’s main objection to London was simply the size of the place and the inhuman way it was laid out. In Rome, she lived about fifteen minutes’ walk away from the office, in a quiet and inexpensive part of town near Augustus’s mausoleum that had an abundance of restaurants, innumerable shops and a boisterous population. But London was entirely different. Almost no one seemed to live anywhere near the centre and everyone spent hours every day on the tubes or trains either going to work or going home again. And the neighbourhoods they lived in were generally unutterably dull, with few shops and an atmosphere of respectability that made you think they were all tucked up in bed by nine-thirty with a glass of hot milk. The constant cavalcade of streetlife, of people wandering around for the sake of it, greeting their friends, having a drink, everything that made city life worthwhile, scarcely existed. London was not Flavia’s idea of a good time.

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