‘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.
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