The Bernini Bust (20 page)

“You could always have di Souza buried here.”

He groaned with dismay at the fastidiousness of his conscience. “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. But Hector would haunt me for ever. Oh, well. Do you think I could commandeer this box?” he gestured at a particularly large crate. “It’s empty.”

She looked at it. “You can’t move corpses in packing cases,” she said, slightly shocked.

“It’s not for Hector, it’s for his carvings. The museum’s decided they don’t want them. Thanet said Langton should never have bought them. Junk, in his opinion.”

He held up a lump of arm and showed it to her. “Frankly, he’s right. Surprises me that they ever considered them.”

“Me, too. And your Titian.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said defensively.

“Except that it’s the only piece of Venetian painting in the place. It doesn’t fit with the collection at all.”

Argyll grumbled away for a few moments about what a good picture it was, then changed the subject. “So, what do you think? About this case?”

“Don’t see why not. Unless it’s used for something.”

She bent down to examine a piece of paper encased in plastic stapled to the side. “It’s the case the Bernini came in,” she observed. “You can’t just take it. We’ll have to check with the police to make sure it’s not needed for something.”

Argyll looked around to see if there was anything else suitable for the task; apart from a few woefully inadequate cardboard boxes, the room was virtually empty.

“It’s going to be one of those days,” he said. Then he came over and peered once more into the box. “And it’s perfect, as well. Just the right size, enormously strong and even got lots of padding in it, all ready.”

He stood back. “I don’t see why we can’t use it. I mean, if it was vital evidence the police would have taken it, wouldn’t they?” Then he made up his mind. “Come on, give me a hand.”

He grabbed the packing case by the top and pulled. “Jesus, this is heavy. Push. Come on. Harder.”

Straining away on all three legs, between them they shifted the wooden box about ten feet across the concrete floor of the storeroom to di Souza’s statuary. Argyll liked to think that, fully functional, he could have done it himself. But it was still absurdly well built, even by the Moresby’s standards.

Puffing and blowing, they leant back on it to recover themselves.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Flavia asked anxiously. “It’s going to cost a small fortune just to shift the crate back to Italy. It’s ridiculously heavy.”

“They’re like that here,” he said. “Don’t believe in taking risks. Everything is packed, repacked and double packed. You should have felt the weight of the box they put my little Titian in at the airport. Better take the Bernini label off, in case people get confused.”

He reached down and pulled off the old shipment label, scrumpled it up and tossed it into the corner.

Flavia wandered over, retrieved the sheet of paper he had so carelessly thrown away, and carefully flattened it out again.

“Jonathan?” she said.

“What?”

“How heavy do you think this thing is?”

“Search me. About five tons?”

“Seriously.”

“Don’t know. Over a hundredweight? Something like that.”

“And how much do you reckon the bust weighs?”

Argyll shrugged. “Seventy pounds? Maybe more.”

“But this shipping label records the case’s weight as 120 pounds. So what does it mean if the box weighs the same now as when it came through customs with a Bernini in it?”

“Urn.”

“It means that the bust wasn’t stolen from Thanet’s office at all. Which, of course, means that…’

“What?”

“It means that you’re going to have to find another box to ship di Souza’s statues in. And Mr. Langton has got some explaining to do.”

The last person she had to see was David Barclay, whom she tracked down in his office high in the skies over the city. Awfully chic -thick pile carpet and secretaries and high-technology bits all over the place. All in white again; strange how the local population didn’t seem to like colour in their rooms.

Flavia tried hard to remember that personal antipathy did not, in law, constitute grounds for conviction. But Barclay was not her sort. Something about the hair, and her strong suspicion that his character and opinions had been so carefully groomed over the years that they had almost ceased to exist, made her dislike the man. Blandness, as universally acceptable as his white sofa, carefully adopted to offend no one.

Not that spending a fortune on clothes and haircuts and shoes and little gold knickknacks offended her; she was Italian, after all. But Italian men were more open about being incurably vain; delighted in it, in fact. They dressed to impress themselves, often succeeded and didn’t really care what other people thought. But any vanity in Barclay was a secondary matter; he constructed himself to impress others; there was nothing of him on show at all.

Questioning him was difficult. The best way of loosening him up would have been to inform him that, all things considered, he was lucky he wasn’t already in jail. But this strictly wasn’t her business, and she was a touch nervous about saying the wrong thing. Other people’s legalisms are often very difficult to understand. So she started off with generalities, asking for his opinion about the murder.

“Can’t help. Even in abstract I can’t think of any reason to kill Moresby.”

It was extraordinary how obtuse people were about their own advantage, she thought. Anne Moresby was inheriting billions; he might well share in it, Langton was after Thanet’s job, Thanet was gunning for Streeter, Moresby junior was resentful about being penniless, they were all neurotic about what the old man was about to do with his money, and this lawyer couldn’t think of any reason for what had been going on. Extraordinary.

“As far as the bust is concerned, all I know is that I authorised the transfer of money to an account in Switzerland to pay for it.”

“You took no part in the acquisition process?”

“Apart from that, no. The first I heard about it was when I got a call from Moresby telling me to rustle up the money. Buying art is not my business. Paying for it is. Was, rather.”

“And there was nothing unusual about it? Nothing in the process that struck you as odd?”

“Not at all.”

“So you transferred two million dollars on the day the bust was stolen? Or was it four? People seem oddly hazy about this.”

Barclay hesitated. Flavia caught the change in mood and wondered about it. It was, after all, merely a routine question; hardly a penetrating thrust to the heart of the matter. A random sentence designed merely to give her time to think up the next line of enquiry. So she couldn’t really take any credit at all for the result.

Which was that, coming at a moment when Barclay was feeling more than a little alarmed at his prospects, the enquiry made him take a leap and open up about a little matter which, he considered, could make him look very bad indeed should he ever be hauled into court. Much better to mention it now; try it out on someone unofficial and see what the result was.

“I wondered when you’d find out,” he said.

“Hmm,” she replied, not being able to think of anything better.

“It was both, of course.”

“Pardon?”

“Both.”

It meant nothing at all to Flavia, but the grave and confiding look on Barclay’s face clearly indicated that he regarded the matter as being of some significance. So she nodded in the way you do when you want to suggest that the anomaly was just the little detail that you’d been expecting to find.

“I see,” she said slowly. “I see.”

Barclay was reassured that she dealt with the revelation in such a matter-of-fact way. Leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling, he elaborated on the theme, while Flavia tried to work out what on earth he was talking about.

“It’s been going on for years,” he said. “I should never have agreed; but Moresby was a man you did not say no to. Now I imagine it’s only a matter of time before someone starts going through columns of numbers and totting up figures and finding my name on every authorisation. And Thanet’s of course.”

“Thanet?”

“Of course. Couldn’t have worked without him. He had to provide the valuations, saying these things were worth the amount Moresby wanted to claim. At the start I think he took it on trust, same as I did. Moresby would say he’d paid a certain amount, and Thanet would say Moresby had donated a piece
worth
that amount. I don’t suppose it ever crossed his mind there was anything wrong. Nor did I; I just did as I was told.

“Of course, Thanet reckoned the old man was paying far too much, but that was his prerogative. Then he mentioned to me that those crooked Europeans were taking him for a ride, and I looked around. By that time it was too late. We could imagine all too easily an IRS inspector staring at us: “Mr. Moresby has been consistently evading taxes for years by claiming to pay three or four times what he in fact paid, and you expect us to believe you knew nothing about it?”

“Of course they would never have believed it. Both of us were naive, and then both of us, I guess, were too concerned about keeping our jobs. So I transferred money and hid it all over the place, and Thanet kept on making out fraudulent assessments of value for presentation to the taxmen.”

Flavia had at last caught up with him. But just to make sure, she said: ‘So you transferred four million to Europe. Two million of that went to pay for the bust itself, and the other two is still in a Moresby account somewhere?”

Barclay nodded. “That’s right. From there on, the process would have been the same. Moresby would have presented a bill saying the bust cost four million, Thanet would have said it was worth four million, and I would have filled out Moresby’s tax form to that effect claiming an income tax deduction. The result would be that he got the bust almost free.”

“But where did the two million which paid for the bust go?”

“Automatic transfer to the owner from the Moresby account in Switzerland.”

“Yes, but who? Tell me, is there any chance that the money went into Langton’s bank account?”

He shook his head with a quiet smile. “Oh, no. One thing about Mr. Moresby, he was not the trusting type. Not where the art world was concerned. He always kept tabs on his employees. I’ve been checking; the money did not go to Langton. And the police tell me it didn’t go to di Souza either.”

Nor to anyone else, as far as Flavia could make out. How strange. “Tell me, all this was just a bit illegal, wasn’t it?”

Barclay nodded. “You could say that.”

“And the total saved in this fashion?”

“I added it all up this morning. Spent about forty-nine million, claimed eighty-seven million. Working it out exactly is hard, but at a rough guess I reckon he avoided tax of about fifteen million dollars.”

“And that’s what? Over the last five years or so?”

Barclay looked at her in faint surprise. “Oh no. The last eighteen months. Of course, the outlay began to go up fast once he began to warm to the idea of the Big Museum.”

Even at the uninflated prices it was pretty impressive stuff; certainly more than any museum in the Italian system ever got. Barclay, however, was more concerned with other matters.

“Pulling a fast one on the IRS… Well, I mean, they’re vengeful. I’d rather upset the Mob, myself. Only real brutes work as IRS investigators.”

He gave an involuntary shudder, and Flavia considered what he had said. “Who knew of this? Presumably it was the sort of thing that was kept relatively quiet?”

He nodded. “Oh yes. I imagine quite a lot of people suspected -Anne Moresby certainly did; she even asked me to pass on material to incriminate Thanet. Of course I refused, because it would have incriminated myself as well, but she seemed to get hold of material anyway. I don’t know how. Langton may well have had a notion of what was going on. But I think probably only Thanet, myself and Moresby knew precisely. That’s why there was such a fuss over Collins.”

“Who?”

“A curator that Langton brought in. He mentioned he was a bit doubtful over a Hals that Moresby bought. There was a bit of alarm that there’d be an investigation and the real worth - and the real price — of the picture would emerge. So he was got rid of, pronto. Thanet came up with some reason for accusing him of incompetence and he was out. There was a hell of a fight about it in the museum; it brought out the long-standing enmity between Thanet and Langton a bit too clearly for comfort.”

Flavia nodded again. Another complication. Moresby in the centre of things, as a sort of hole in the middle. She realised suddenly that she knew nothing about the man at all. Many opinions, all of them unfavourable, but no real sense of what made him tick. Why, for example, did a man worth so much work so hard to cheat the tax man out of so little? Relatively speaking, anyway.

Barclay, who she was coming to think of as not nearly as facile as initial impressions suggested, scratched his chin and tried to think of an explanation.

“Just the way he was, I guess. He was a miser. Not in the classic sense of living in a slum and hiding it under the mattress, but a psychological miser. He knew the value of money and would do anything to hang on to what he considered was his. It was a religion. He would work as hard to save one dollar as a million. Or a billion. The sum wasn’t important; the principle was the thing. He was a man of principle. Anyone who took his money was an enemy, and he’d do anything to stop them. And that included all taxmen.

“That doesn’t imply he was mean; he wasn’t. When he wanted to be he could be very generous. As long as he decided. Not someone else. Does that sound convincing?”

She supposed so. But having never met anyone like that she’d have to take it on trust.

“Was he a vengeful man?”

“In what sense?”

“I mean, if someone wronged him, in his eyes. Did he bear a grudge?”

Barclay threw back his head and laughed. “Did he bear a grudge? Ha! Yes, I think you could say that. Indeed. If someone trod on his toe Moresby would follow him to the end of the world to get his revenge.”