Giotto's Hand

Bottando waved his hand airily. “See what you can find,” he said confidently. “My memory never lets me down, you know. We old elephants…”

So off she went, down the stairs into the basement, where she burrowed into the dust piles, ruining her clothes for half an hour, before emerging, triumphant but extremely discontented.

Her complaints to her boss were temporarily delayed by a sneezing fit when she got back to his office bearing a large and bulky file.

“Bless you, my dear,” Bottando said sympathetically as she roared away.

“It’s all your fault,” she said in between interruptions. “It’s a complete shambles down there. If an entire pile of stuff hadn’t collapsed and spilled over the floor, I would never have found it.”

“But you did.”

“I did. Stored, completely out of sequence, in a vast file called ‘Giotto’. What in God’s name is that?”

“Oh,” Bottando said, realization dawning. “Giotto. That’s why I remember.”

“So?”

“One of the great geniuses of his age,” the General said with a slight twitch of a smile.

Flavia scowled again.

“I don’t mean that Giotto,” Bottando explained. “I mean a gentleman of superhuman skill, breathtaking audacity, almost total invisibility. So clever, so astute, that, alas, he doesn’t exist.”

Flavia gave him the sort of reproving look that such enigmatic comments deserved.

“A fit of whimsy that came out of a quiet summer a couple of years back,” he went on. “Just after that Vélasquez vanished from Milan. When was it? That’s right. 1992.”

Flavia looked at him curiously. “The portrait? From the Calleone collection?”

He nodded. “That’s the one. Convenient burglar alarm failure, someone went in, took it, left and vanished. Quick and neat. A portrait of a girl called Francesca Arunta. It was never seen again, and two years is a long time for it to be gone. Lovely picture, too, it seems, although there was no photograph.”

“What?”

“No. No photograph. Amazing, isn’t it? Some people. Although in fact that’s quite common. That’s what gave me the idea. Lots of pictures in the house, and the only one taken was the only one which had never been photographed. In this case, there was at least a print made in the nineteenth century. On the board over there.”

He pointed to a noticeboard on the far side of his office, covered with what had been called the devil’s list: photographs of paintings, sculpture and other oddments that had vanished without trace. Half obscured by a gold, fourteenth-century chalice which had presumably long since been melted down into ingots, Flavia saw a dogeared photocopy of a print of a painting. Not the sort of thing you could easily take into court for the purposes of identification. But it was just about clear enough to give you an idea.

“Anyway,” he went on, “it was embarrassing, not least because old Calleone was in a position to make a stink, and did. And we got nowhere; all the usual channels of enquiry went dead on us; not a regular customer, not organized crime, but obviously a real pro. So, in desperation, I started looking through all the back cases for a hint of someone who might have done it. And came up with a list of unphotographed paintings that had vanished in a similar fashion. I got quite carried away, hence the rather bulky file. Even made a few enquiries. But eventually I stepped back, had a long hard look and realized the whole thing was a total waste of time.”

“It sounds quite a good idea to me,” she said, settling herself on the sofa and placing the file by her side. “Are you sure you were wrong?”

“Oh, in theory there was nothing wrong with it at all. Which just shows what’s wrong with theory. The trouble was, once I began to think about it, I realized I now had one man, who I dubbed Giotto…”

“Why?”

Bottando smiled. “Because my imaginary character was a real master at his trade, of great importance, but we knew virtually nothing about him. No personality or anything. A bit like Giotto. But, as I say, I had made this creation of mine responsible for more than two dozen thefts from at least 1963 onwards. Encompassing four different countries, in each case taking unphotographed pictures which were never seen again. Without anyone in a dozen or more specialized police units even suspecting his existence. Without a single fence or buyer ever breaking ranks and offering information. Without a single work ever being recovered.”

“Hmm.”

“And then, of course, the whole thing blew up when I came across a note from the Carabinieri saying they’d arrested someone six months previously for another job which I’d nominally pencilled in as being by Giotto’s hand. Giacomo Sandano. Remember him?”

“The world’s worst thief?”