Iain Pears - The Raphael Affair

A quiet and relaxing weekend allowed her to recover fully from the effects of oriental brewing. She occupied herself by being utterly domesticated in a way unusual for her — tidying the flat, doing some shopping, taking some clothes to the dry-cleaners. She forgot about work almost entirely until she made the brief walk to the office at eight-thirty the following Monday.

Paolo, the colleague whom she liked the most, greeted her. She asked what had been going on since she left.

‘One case of jewellery, two and a half thousand eighteenth-century books, four paintings, thirty-eight prints. All gone. And the usual threats against that Raphael; somebody or other decided we should deal with them. We’ve had about a hundred sent over from the museum — part of the General’s new committee work. Poor man, it’s driving him to drink...’

They were settling down for a good and relaxing early morning conversation when Bottando stuck his head round the door. ‘Ah, there you are, my dear. Good trip? Splendid. Come up to my office and tell me about it in five minutes, would you?’

He vanished again. Paolo looked at the door. ‘He seems very edgy these days. I think he’s still worrying about how to avoid landing in it if anything goes wrong with that damn painting. Don’t know why. In the last few weeks he’s surrounded this department with more defences and bureaucratic outworks than Fort Knox.’

Flavia shrugged. ‘Maybe. Still, that reminds me of something I wanted to tell him. It might make him relax a bit.’

She went up the stairs, walked through his door without knocking, as usual, and sat herself on his armchair. She summarised the meeting swiftly, then briefly ran over Argyll’s tale about his researches.

‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ she ended lamely. Bottando had his Silly-Little-Woman look on his face. He rarely used it, especially on her. ‘What do you think should be done about it?’ she said.

‘Nothing. File it and forget it. Better still, don’t even file it. I’m much too old to go looking for trouble, and the very thought of telling the curator of the National Museum that he might have an old copy on his hands makes my pension start to shrink before my very eyes.’

‘But we should do something, surely? A quiet warning, a little suggestion?’

‘My dear, if you didn’t have me to protect you you’d be eaten alive. Now be sensible and think. The minister of defence is a Socialist, correct? And the arts minister is a Christian Democrat. And they don’t like each other. Now, an old southern Socialist under this Socialist defence minister lets out the word that the arts minister has goofed in a big way. Do they say “thank you for the warning, good of you to tell us?” Not likely. They suspect a conspiracy by the minority parties in the government to nobble their newly rising star and bring the DCI into disrepute. But they look anyway, discover the picture is genuine, and one ageing general, looking forward to his retirement, is wheeled out on to the scaffold to restore peace and harmony in the coalition. Preceded, I might add, by his very best assistant who is a notorious member of the Communist Party...’

‘No I’m not. Membership’s lapsed.’

‘Ex-member,’ her boss amended, ‘who is exactly the sort of person who would come up with a naïve plot to undermine the government.’

‘But what if it really isn’t genuine?’

‘If it isn’t, they have a scandal on their hands. But we keep out of it, stand on the sidelines and watch. Our job is to protect that painting, not to run around causing trouble. And whatever evidence we produce will have to be very, very persuasive. You remember that Watteau that caused all the fuss a few years ago?’

Flavia nodded.

‘Pronounced as genuine by everyone, and sold to the States for a fortune. And what happens? Someone writes an article saying it’s a fake. Says that if you look in the background you can see the word “Merde” written clear as day. I’ve seen it myself, he is quite right. The painting popped up from nowhere, it has no history, no one has ever mentioned it before. It’s ninety-five per cent certain it’s a phoney. But who admits it? Not the museum, which paid three million dollars, not the art dealer who might have to give the money back, and not the critics and historians, who have already said how wonderful it is. So there it stays, despite clear and conclusive evidence that it’s a monstrous hoax.

‘Now you come to our Raphael, which cost twenty-five times as much, and has a history that can be traced back to the artist’s brush. If it was a phoney the head of the National Museum would have to resign, and his patron; the minister, would have to go too, because he appropriated this purchase as his idea.’ He walked over to the window and stared out of it onto the façade of San Ignazio opposite.

‘And he would have to be replaced, and the Socialists, the Liberals, the Republicans and all of them would demand that they be given his ministry because he had made such a mess. And the Christian Democrats would refuse because even now they only have a majority of one in the cabinet. And the government would duly collapse once more.’ He waved an arm in the direction of the Chamber of Deputies, up next to the ice-cream store where Flavia had taken Argyll.

‘Can you imagine how much every museum head, politician, academic and newspaper critic would be mobilised to assert that, without any doubt, the picture was genuine? The proof that it was not would have to be three hundred per cent certain, absolutely unassailable and without the slightest glimmering of doubt.

‘And what you and this man Argyll have got isn’t. Any academic worth his salt would make mincemeat of it.

‘I don’t mind taking some risks,’ he added, sitting down again and staring at her firmly. ‘But I am damned if I am going to commit suicide for a hunch concocted by a walking disaster like that man Argyll. They would eat him for breakfast — that is if they took any notice of him at all — disappointed and impoverished scholar, nursing a grudge, tries to get his revenge by starting a slanderous rumour. They’d wipe him out. They might even be right.’

‘Dear me, what a day,’ sighed Bottando, reaching out and tapping the waiter on the arm as he passed. ‘Another?’

Spello shook his head. ‘No, thank you. I find alcohol a very poor consolation for an afternoon like this. A coffee, however, would be welcome.’

The policeman ordered the drinks, and the two men, both in their fifties, sat in companionable discontent as they waited. It had been a hard afternoon. A meeting of Tommaso’s infernal committee. A bit of nifty footwork on Bottando’s part had cut sessions down, but they had to meet sometimes. And Tommaso had worked himself into a frenzy of anxiety over his picture, demanding ever tighter security. This afternoon had been typical: a suggestion had come from Antonio Ferraro — demand was a more accurate way of describing it — that the entire building be rewired. It needed it, certainly, but, as Spello pointed out while vetoing the scheme, there wasn’t enough money.

At least the machinations of museum politics had produced one pleasant change. Bottando had suggested that Ferraro might be too busy to head the museum’s representation on the committee. Ferraro had agreed, evidently not liking the job, and Bottando had suggested Spello instead. The policeman felt a bit mean about this, but he was coming to sympathise with Tommaso’s distaste for the sculpture expert. A very prickly character, he was unable to control a meeting without being gratuitously offensive, and had absolutely no sense that the opinions of others might have any merit at all.

The only thing to be said for Ferraro was that he exited from the committee with good grace, leaving behind only the megalomaniac, outrageously expensive, and utterly impracticable schemes he had already dreamt up; Spello was much more in tune with Bottando’s disdain for committee work, and rushed through the business of killing them all off as fast as was seemly.