Giotto's Hand

“No, it’s not. It’s politics. Argan doesn’t want Bottando to look into this, and so Bottando, to show he’s in charge, will have to do just that. Having gone on about leaving no stone unturned to recover paintings, he has to go and peek under some pebbles. Otherwise he seems slack even by his own standards.”

Argyll nodded, then stood up and gathered the dirty plates. Too many flies around this evening. “It’ll land him in trouble one day, you know,” he said sagely. “Does he have to be so pugnacious?”

Flavia smiled knowingly. “It’s easy to tell you’ve never worked in a large organization. Argan’s a fool, but he has such boundless self-confidence that he convinces people who don’t know any better. Which means that he is constantly being put in positions of authority. So everybody else has to spend a great deal of time tripping him up. It’s all part of the job.”

“I’m glad I’m self-employed, then.”

“But unlike you, we get our salaries even if we don’t do anything. In fact, in Argan’s case, the less he does, the more he gets.”

A sore point. Argyll remained convinced that, somewhere out there, an individual existed who desperately wanted to buy at least one of his pictures. Finding this person was proving massively difficult at the moment. So much so that he was seriously having to consider what he gloomily called alternatives. A full-blown crisis had been precipitated by the arrival of a letter from an international university in Rome which processed eager young things anxious to learn about art and culture. One of its art historians had absconded to a better job at the last moment, and they had in desperation written to Argyll. Did he want a job for a couple of years teaching from the Caracci to Canova?

Flavia had seen this as a solution to all his problems, but Argyll wasn’t so sure. He’d worked hard to set up as a dealer; giving up now would seem very much like failure. And he hated the thought of being forced to give up. Besides which, teaching looked like hard work to him.

Deeply depressing. He had enough money to trickle along, but so far had failed to make a breakthrough into the next division up. He needed to buy better pictures. But to do that, he needed some capital to buy the better pictures to start off with, and he simply didn’t have it. He’d grumbled away for weeks and months, and now he’d decided to go off to England to consult his old mentor and employer to see if he had any ideas.

He’d not been very good company recently. But then, nor had Flavia. She didn’t mind Argyll not making much money; she did mind him not being able to make up his mind about what to do. The job offer had been lying around for nearly two weeks now, he still hadn’t responded, and his constant fretting was, in her view, becoming tiresome. She was very tolerant, normally. But as he did have to make up his mind sooner or later, she didn’t see why he couldn’t get it over with.

“What’s this Giotto idea, then?” he said as a diversionary tactic to make the conversation less depressing.

“Pouf! Nothing really. Just a fancy of the General’s when he got snookered by a stolen Vélasquez.”

“This the one he had pinned up in his office a couple of summers back? The one that got him into trouble with the ministry?”

“That’s right. A well-connected owner. It was worth looking at, but he was right to junk the whole idea. He spotted a couple of dozen thefts which all seemed to be by the same hand. Houses with old collections and pictures that hadn’t been on the market for decades, if not centuries. Badly catalogued and often unphotographed. Small pictures of high value, generally High Renaissance. All chosen with an expert eye, and all stolen very deftly: no violence, no sign of break-ins, no damage to anything. Whoever did them all went in and out within minutes, knew exactly what they were after and were never distracted. Only one picture taken on any one occasion. All indicating, so he thought, a suspiciously similar degree of patience and dexterity.”

“Sounds good to me. What’s wrong with the idea?”

“Because it goes against common sense and his fundamental law of art theft, which is that thieves aren’t that good. Which is perfectly true. They’re greedy, impatient, clumsy and generally not very bright. They make mistakes. They talk too much. They get shopped by accomplices. They don’t methodically pursue their careers for thirty years, never overreaching themselves, never making a mistake, never trusting the wrong person, always resisting the temptation to tell the world how clever they are. And most of them now work for organized crime: lone thieves are virtually extinct.

“Giotto was a figment of the imagination, and Bottando is much too sensible to be led astray by such nonsense. You know him. Your turn to make the coffee, I think.”

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