Iain Pears - Giotto's Hand

General Taddeo Bottando’s triumphantly successful campaign towards the unmasking of the shadowy English art dealer, Geoffrey Forster, as the most extraordinary thief of his generation began with a letter, postmarked Rome, that turned up on his desk on the third floor of the Art Theft Department on a particularly fine morning in late July.

Initially, this small hand grenade of sticky-taped and stamped information lay there until the General—a stickler for routine in the morning until he was sufficiently wide awake to improvise—completed his morning rounds of watering his pot-plants, studying the pages of the newspapers and having a cup of the coffee which came up in regular shipments from the bar across the Piazza San Ignazio.

Then, item by item, he dug his way through the mail put in the in-tray by his secretary, slowly excavating the pile of miscellaneous messages until, eventually, at about 8:45 a.m., he picked up the thin, inexpensive paper envelope and slit it open with his paper knife.

He wasn’t wildly excited; the address had been handwritten, in what was very much the weak and spidery manner of old age, and so it seemed likely that it would be a waste of time. All institutions have their little collection of nutters who gather round and try to attract attention, and the Art Theft Department was no exception. Everybody in the squad had their own personal favourite among this motley, but generally harmless, crew. Bottando’s own was the man in Trento who claimed to be the reincarnation of Michelangelo and wanted the Florence David back on the grounds that the Medicis had never paid him enough for it. Flavia di Stefano—who sometimes exhibited signs of a peculiar sense of humour which might have had something to do with living with an Englishman—had a weakness for the man who, concerned about the plight of the Apulian vole, kept on threatening to smear jam over the Vittorio Emanuele monument in Rome to draw the attention of the world’s press. In Flavia’s view, such gastronomic terrorism would probably greatly improve the horrible monstrosity, and she had to be restrained from writing back to encourage him in his project. As she said, in some parts of the world you get government art grants for that sort of thing.

Not exactly burning with anticipation, therefore, Bottando leant back in his chair, unfolded the letter, and skimmed through it. Then, frowning in the fashion of someone trying to remember a dream that is just out of reach, he went back to the beginning and read it again, this time more carefully.

Then he picked up the phone and called Flavia so she could have a look as well.

Esteemed and honourable sir , the letter began in that opulently respectful way which the Italian language still preserves for formal correspondence , I am writing to confess that I am a criminal, having been involved in the theft of a painting which was once the property of the Palazzo Straga in Florence, This crime, which I freely confess, took place in July 1963. May God forgive me, for I know I cannot forgive myself

With my most obedient respects,

Maria Fancelli.

Flavia, when she came into the office, read it through with only minimal attention and double-checked she wasn’t missing anything. Then she brushed her long fair hair back into place, rubbed her nose meditatively with the flat of her palm, and delivered her final and considered verdict.

“Pouf!” she said. “So what?”

Bottando shook his head in a thoughtful fashion. “So something. Maybe.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Age has its virtues,” he said pompously. “And one of them is fragments of primeval memory which young snips like you do not possess.”

“Thirty-three last week.”

“Middle-aged snips like you, then, if that makes you feel any better. The Palazzo Straga has a familiar ring to it, somehow.”

Bottando tapped his pen against his teeth, frowned, and looked up at the ceiling. “Um,” he said.

“Straga. Florence. 1963. Picture. Um.”

And he sat there, staring dreamily out of the window, with Flavia sitting patiently opposite, wondering if he was going to tell her what was on his mind.

“Ha!” he said with a relieved smile as his memory began behaving itself after a few more minutes. “Got it. If you would be so kind as to look in the extinct box, my dear?”

The extinct box was a misnomer for the small broom cupboard that was the last resting place for hopeless causes—those crimes which had an almost minimal chance of ever being resolved. It was very full.

Flavia got up to obey orders. “I must say,” she said sceptically as she opened the door, “your memory amazes me. Are you sure about this?”

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.”