The Bernini Bust (8 page)

Still grumbling and stroking his moustache with fury, he grudgingly led the way in. “Waste of time, I suppose,” he complained as they passed through a dusty entrance hall into a dark, wood-panelled study. “Can’t imagine you’ll get anything back now.”

He flung open the top of a desk in the corner and extracted a sheet of paper. “There you are,” he said. “Best I can do.”

Flavia looked at it and shook her head despairingly. The chances of getting anything back were always fairly small, even when the descriptions were complete and photographs appended. Any burglar with even half a brain knew that it was imperative to get stolen goods over the border fast.

But this thief needn’t have bothered. The list was about as useful as an old sweet packet. On the other hand, it did provide a useful cover for the department’s tardiness. No one could blame them if Alberghi’s goods were never seen again.

““One old landscape. One silver pot, an old bust, two or three portraits,”’ she read. “Is that all you could manage?”

For the first time she got him on the defensive, and his moustache twirling switched from aggressive to defensive mode. “Best I could do,” he repeated.

“But this is useless. What do you expect us to do now? Go round and examine every portrait in Europe in the hope one might turn out to be yours? You’re meant to be an art expert, for heaven’s sake.”

“Me?” he said scornfully. “I know nothing about it.”

In the circumstances, Flavia thought that the tinge of pride in his voice was misplaced. A small amount of expertise would have greatly increased his chances of recovering his family possessions. Mind you, now she thought about it, he did not look much like a museum curator to her.

“I thought you worked for a museum,” she said.

“Certainly not,” he said. “That was my uncle, Enrico. He died last year. I’m Alberto. Army man,” he said, chin jutting up and chest popping out at the very mention.

“Isn’t there a list or inventory or something? Anything would be better than this.”

“Fraid not. Uncle had it all in his mind.” He tapped the side of his head as he spoke, in case Flavia was uncertain where his uncle’s mind might have been located. “Never got around to writing it down. Pity, but there it was. Would have done.” He lowered his voice as though revealing a family scandal. “A bit - you know - in his last years,” he said confidingly.

“What?”

“Ga-ga. The old brain box. Not what it was. You know.” He tapped his head again, a bit mournfully this time. Then he cheered up a little. “Still,” he went on. “Eighty-nine. A good run. Can’t complain. Hope I last so long, eh? eh?”

Flavia agreed, although privately thinking that the sooner the old fool dropped dead the better, then wondered if there were any insurance documents that might provide a bit of help.

Colonel Alberghi shook his head again. “None,” he said. “I know that, because I went through his papers when he died and looked again after that fella came.”

“What fella?”

“Chap turned up, wondering if I wanted to sell anything. Damned impertinence. Sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you.”

“Hold on a second. You didn’t mention this to the carabinieri.”

“Didn’t ask.”

“What man was this?”

“I told you. He turned up and knocked on the door. I sent him away.”

“Did he look around the house?”

“Damned silly maid let him in here to wait for me.”

“And what did he look like?”

“Didn’t see him. Maid phoned me, and I told her to chuck him out. Didn’t give up, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“He rang a couple of days later. I told him I hadn’t the faintest idea what my uncle had owned, but I did know I didn’t want to - didn’t need to - sell any of it.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you got his name?”

“Sorry.”

Flavia had thought so, somehow. “And what was stolen from here?”

“Ah, now. Let me see.”

“A painting,” she hinted, pointing at the patch on the woodwork that had evidently been covered by something.

“Yes, yes. Perhaps. A portrait? Great grandfather? Or may be his father. Perhaps it was my great grandmother? Do you know, I never paid much attention to it.”

Evidently. “And what about that empty pedestal there?”

“Ah, yes. A bust. Big damn ugly thing, it was. I was going to grow a pot plant over it.”

“Too much to hope for a description, I suppose?”

“Just given you one,” he said. “I’d recognise it if I saw it.”

Not much chance of that, she thought. “I’ll put out a search request for a big, damn ugly bust, sex indeterminate, then,” she said sarcastically. “Can I see this maid of yours?”

“Why?”

“It’s quite usual for thieves to case a place before they burgle. Posing as an art dealer is a good way of going about it.”

“You mean he was looking the place over? The cheek of it!” Alberghi said, puffing up with righteous indignation. “I shall call that maid immediately. Who knows? She may well have been part of the gang.”

Flavia did her best to turn him away from the idea of international conspiracies of burglars that was clearly forming in his mind, and pointed out that the robbery — a simple brick through the window when the house was empty - hardly required an inside hand to succeed.

Nor was the maid, a woman of at least eighty years and almost bent double with arthritis, the archetypal gangster’s moll. The moment she saw the old biddy, Flavia had the feeling she was going to be as blind as a bat. It was one of those days.

A youngish man, the maid said, which was a start, but then she pointed at the colonel, a man in his late fifties, and said that maybe he was the same age as the master. Tactically acute though; Alberghi was quite pleased.

After much patient questioning, Flavia established that the purported art dealer was between thirty and sixty, medium height, and had no distinguishing features she could remember.

“Hair?” she asked.

That’s right, she said. He had some.

“I mean, what colour?”

She shook her head. No idea.

Marvellous. Flavia snapped her notebook shut, stuffed it back in her bag and said she was going to go.

“Frankly, Colonel, I think you can wave goodbye to your pieces. We pick stuff up every now and then, and when we do, we’ll give you a call. Apart from that, the only thing I can recommend is that you keep your eye on auction sale catalogues, in case you see something you recognise. If you do, let us know.”

Alberghi, with a sudden spurt of regimental courtesy, swept ahead to open the door for her as she left. The gesture was spoilt by a noisy yapping sound and a heartfelt, military style stream of cursing as a tiny dog ran in and almost swept him off his feet. This was evidently the ferocious animal advertised on the gate.

“Get that beast out of here,” he instructed the maid. “Which one is it, anyway?”

The old woman, with remarkable agility, pounced on the animal, swept it into her bosom and cradled it gently. “There, there,” she said, and patted it on its head. “This one is Brunelleschi, sir. The one with a white spot and the clouding eyes.”

“Horrid little things,” he said, eyeing it like someone wondering how it would do as a pot roast.

“It seems quite sweet,” Flavia said, noting that the old lady’s hearing and eyesight weren’t so bad after all. “Odd name, though.”

“My uncle’s,” he said mournfully. “Otherwise I’d get rid of them. Arty type, as you know, so gave his dogs stupid names. Other one’s called Bernini.”

“Oh, good,” said Bottando as Flavia arrived back in the office at slightly after nine. She was planning to dump her notes on the desk for typing up the next morning, then go home for a long bath and an evening’s self-indulgent misery in front of the television. There was never anything worth watching, which made it an even more appropriate way of wasting time. “I was hoping you’d come back. Got something for you.”

She looked at him with cautious disapproval. He had on his air of amiable benevolence, which generally meant having to do something she’d rather avoid.

“What is it now?”

“Well, I thought of you, you see,” he said. “Because of your friend Argyll. Just the person, I thought.”

There was, at the moment, no surer way of irritating Flavia than to think of her because of Jonathan Argyll, so she sniffed loudly, got on with rearranging papers on her desk and tried to ignore him.

“This murder, and theft. The one in Los Angeles. It’s causing quite a stir, you know. Even made the evening news. Did you see it?”

Flavia pointed out that she’d spent the last few hours wasting time talking to military idiots in the countryside, not idling away in her office with her feet up. Bottando brushed the comment aside.

“Quite. The point is that the police there have been on the phone. A man called Morelli. Speaks Italian, surprisingly. Just as well, otherwise I’d have had enormous difficulties understanding him…’

“Well?”

“They want us to pick up their prime suspect. A man called di Souza, do you know him?”

As patiently as possible, Flavia said she didn’t.

“I’m surprised. He’s been around for years. Awful old fraud. Anyway, it seems he and Moresby were having a row about a Bernini that di Souza smuggled out of the country. Moresby dead, Bernini gone and di Souza, so they reckon, on the next plane back to Italy. It gets into Rome in about an hour, and they want us to grab him and bung him back.”

“Not our department,” she said shortly. “Why not try the carabinieri?”

“Paperwork. By the time all the international liaison departments had finished organising it, the plane would have been sold for scrap. So your friend Argyll recommended us. Good idea. Quick thinking. Could you, er…’

“Miss dinner and spend the night hanging around Fiumicino? No.”

Bottando frowned sternly. “I really don’t know what’s got into you these days,” he said. “What on earth is the matter? It’s not like you, all this bad temper and uncooperative attitude. You used to spend most of your time begging me for jobs like this. But if you insist, you can get back to being a simple researcher. Full time. I’ll get a proper member of the polizia to do it.”

Flavia sat down on the desk and looked at him mournfully. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’ve been a pain recently. I just don’t seem to have much enthusiasm for anything these days. I’ll go to the airport for you. I suppose it might perk me up a bit, arresting someone.”

“What you need is a holiday,” Bottando said firmly. It was his universal remedy for all ills and he took one himself as often as was decent. “Change of air and scenery.”

She shook her head. A holiday was the last thing she wanted at the moment.

Bottando eyed her sympathetically for a moment, then patted her gently on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll pass.”

She looked up at him. “What will?”

He shrugged slightly and waved his hand about airily. “Whatever it is that’s putting you in such a bad mood. Anyway, nice though it is to talk…’ He looked at his watch in a significant fashion.

She got up wearily and brushed her hand through her hair. “OK. What shall I do with him when I get him?”

“Hand him over to the airport police. They’ll hold him until all the paperwork’s in order. I’ve arranged everything. You’ll just be there to identify him and deal with formalities. I’ve got all the bits of paper you’ll need, and a photograph. Shouldn’t be any real trouble.”

In making this statement, Bottando was almost entirely wrong, but for reasons which were not his fault. Getting to the airport was a trouble, due to a large pile-up on the stretch of motorway which leads from the city to the patch of reclaimed marshland which tries its hardest to be an international airport. Silly place to put it, but there was some story about a deal with the Vatican which had all this useless land and a friend in the planning department…

Flavia got to the terminal at ten, parked in a Strictly No Parking area - she was lucky there was a space left, but it was late in the evening - and marched in to find the airport police. Then they took up their stations and waited until someone had the bright idea of checking the board, and discovered that the plane was half an hour late due to a longer than anticipated stopover in Madrid.

Madrid? she thought. No one ever said anything to her about Madrid. The day had started off badly, got worse, and now looked as though it was going to go out in appropriate style.

There was no alternative but to wait, knowing with that utter certainty that sometimes descends, that she was wasting her time.

She was. The plane finally touched down at 10:45, the firstpassenger appeared through the gate at 11:15 and the last emerged at five minutes to midnight.

No Hector di Souza. Flavia had sacrificed her evening and had nothing to show for it except a protesting stomach and a foul temper.

What was more, she knew full well she could not just go home and forget about it. International protocol demanded you at least put up a show of being co-operative, especially when, somehow or other, you may have made a mess of things.

So she went back to the office yet again, and settled down to the phone. Calls to the airline, to Rome Airport, to Madrid Airport. They’d ring back, they said; and she had to wait. Couldn’t even go out and search for a sandwich, not that there were many places open at that hour.

The final call-back came at nearly three in the morning. Madrid Airport, just like Rome and the airline, confirmed what she basically knew already. No di Souza. Didn’t get off in Madrid, didn’t get off in Rome, didn’t get on the plane at all, as far as anyone knew.

One final call, and that was it. Fortunately - and it was the one good thing that had happened all day, although the fact that it was now tomorrow may have had something to do with it — Detective Morelli was in his office. Bottando said he could speak Italian, and so he could, after a fashion. But Flavia’s English was better.

“Oh, right,” he said. “Yeah, well, we sort of knew that,” he added laconically as she announced her failure. “We checked here. He phoned and booked himself on to the flight, left the hotel, but never showed. Sorry if we put you to unnecessary trouble.”