Iain Pears - Giotto's Hand

But none of these could do much, and on the whole were unwilling to try. Standing up for a colleague was one thing. But enough of Argan’s complaints had been circulated to make them think that this time Bottando was in trouble. If you want to fight back, you have to choose the best possible battlefield. And the old guard had collectively decided to conserve its strength for a more auspicious occasion.

The moment Bottando walked into the room, with a very nervous Flavia with him, he knew she was the only person on his side. And she wasn’t going to be much use. She was completely worn out, what with rushing down to London, and a long, hard bargaining session with Winterton which took three hours before he agreed to cooperate; then the flight back to Rome passing the time by anguishing about whether she was doing the right thing, and finally a rapid briefing of Bottando to give him some ammunition. She did all the talking; a remarkably calm Bottando did little but listen carefully, thank her, then bundle her into the car. The meeting, he explained, had been brought forward.

It was opened by the minister, a drab, if inoffensive man who was much too frail of spirit to go against the advice of his civil servants once they made up their minds. At least he kept things vague, a vocal washing of the hands which indicated that, whatever happened, he hoped no one was going to think he was in any way responsible for it. Next, routine business was gone through, and as a sort of warm-up session, an extraordinary argument broke out over a trivial matter of accounting procedure which did little except indicate how keyed up everybody was.

And then it was Argan’s turn, mild, quiet and all the more dangerous for it.

He started off slowly, on structural matters, gradually drawing the attention of the meeting to the way decisions were taken in the department and how Bottando was ultimately responsible for them. He then went through the statistics on the number of crimes and the number of recoveries and arrests. Even Bottando could hardly put his hand on his heart and say they were good.

“Numbing and meaningless figures,” Argan went on carelessly. “And I hope that I can make the problem clearer by referring to some particular incidents. In the past couple of weeks there have been several crimes of varying seriousness and not a single one has been cleared up or even investigated competently. General Bottando will no doubt tell you that they could not be cleared up in such a short time. That art crimes need to ripen before they are ready for harvest. For generations, if necessary.

“I do not believe that. I believe that a properly organized and focused approach would have a much higher success rate. Strike while the iron is hot. That should be the watchword.

“It is clearly not the motto of the department as it is currently run. When an Etruscan site of major importance is looted. General Bottando sends off one of his girls to talk to some old woman with a grudge about a thirty-year-old crime. When a gallery in the via Giulia is raided, is it investigated? No; the same girl hares off instead to talk to a convicted criminal about some cock and bull story. The crimes and the thefts mount up and off we go to England, where any nonsense is chased after.

“And why? Because the General has a pet theory. For years now, despite all the evidence of how organized crime is responsible for much of art theft, and despite the fact that routine technology is demonstrably superior. General Bottando has been obsessed with an outmoded, romantic notion. In brief, he believes in the master criminal, the shadowy figure who roams free and undetected. Nobody else even suspects the existence of this person, of course. Not a single policeman throughout Europe agrees with him. All common sense screams it is complete nonsense. But, by using entirely spurious reasoning, you can prove anything—and as a former art historian, believe me I know.”

A little jest, Bottando thought absently. He is confident. But then, of course, so he should be. He is using exactly the same techniques. He knows as well as I do that I never believed in Giotto. He knows that I hadn’t even thought about it for years. He knows that Flavia saw Sandano for only a few minutes. And he knows, above all, that it would never have gone any further if he hadn’t turned his attention on it and started manipulating. The slug.

And Argan was still talking, referring to the dangers of applying spurious theories to inadequate evidence, of wasting police effort as a result. Discipline, he was saying. Rigorous, coordinated control to keep attention focused where it was most needed. Times of economic stringency. No room in the modern world for the hunch, the flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approach. Need to conserve police—should he say the taxpayers?— resources. Value for money. Cost-effectiveness. Productivity. Authority. Goal-oriented. Accountability.

Not a single buzzword left unused, not a single soft spot unprodded. Argan finished by saying all the right things; the civil servants positively glowed as he trotted out all the watchwords of their trade. They were lost to Bottando’s cause anyway, probably. But even the policemen present looked uncomfortable. And they were the ones he was going to have to win back. Flavia, who deeply resented every word the man had said, especially the cracks about silly girls, glowered menacingly from her subordinate position at the end of the table, using up all her willpower to stop herself from going over and hitting him.

“General?” said the minister with an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid you have had to listen to a fairly critical account of your department. I’m sure you would like to reply.”

“I suppose so,” Bottando said, leaning forward in his chair, taking out his reading glasses and perching them on the end of his nose so he could peer round the table in a more magisterial fashion. “And I must say I am rather sad that Dottore Argan, after spending so much time in the department, appears to have formed such a low opinion of the way we go about things.

“I have tried to tell him that the department was set up to defend the national heritage and recover it where possible. On several occasions where there has been a conflict between catching a criminal and recovering an important work, we have always been instructed to do the latter. The attention we give is directly related to this; in the case of the Etruscan site robbery, an assault was committed and the case was taken up by the Carabinieri: we offered assistance and were told it wasn’t necessary.”

“Petty bureaucratic demarcation dispute. Surely we are beyond that sort of thing by now?” Argan muttered darkly.

“Naturally,” Bottando went on, “we kept our ears open nonetheless, using the networks of information that have been built up over the years. The human element of detection which, if I may be so bold, no computer will ever supplant.”

Argan snorted. “And what did it produce?”

Bottando sighed as he thought about the comment. Then, not able to say anything which would answer the question adequately, he leant over and picked up a box stationed by his side. Slowly, piece by piece, he took out the contents and handed them around.

“Thirty-nine Etruscan figurines,” he said, watching carefully as they circulated around the table. “Picked up this morning from underneath the bed of a little old lady in Viterbo.”

There was a pause at this small piece of theatre before Argan recovered himself.

“I hope they will be returned to their rightful owners quickly,” Argan said. “We all know about your tendency to decorate your office with stolen goods.”

Bottando beamed at him. “They will be, when all the paperwork is done. But I would like to put it on record now that I do rather resent the waste of time this little case involved. I mean, had Dottore Argan’s brother-in-law paid the looters who stole the antiquities from the site for him in the first place, they would not have felt morally justified in raiding his gallery to get them back. Honour among thieves, you know.”