Iain Pears - The Raphael Affair

Jean Janet was universally liked. One of the rare French protestants, he hailed from the Alsace region in the east of the country, and had headed his department before Bottando’s position had even been a twinkle in a bureaucrat’s eye. In the early years he had been unfailingly helpful in getting the Roman sezione into working order, illicitly handing over vast files of material, introducing Bottando to influential and knowledgeable gossip-mongers in the art world, passing on advice on some of the more subtle aspects of police work in the art field. Bottando had, in turn, gone out of his way to be helpful whenever possible. Any request from Janet was treated as a high-priority matter, and the direct and easy-going exchange of material had proved beneficial to both sides.

Apart from that, Bottando genuinely liked the man’s sense of humour, and Paris had become one of the few places outside Italy that he travelled to willingly. Janet’s only real disadvantage, apart from powerful halitosis, was that he refused to speak anything but French, and this limited conversation. Especially as Bottando was an equally idle linguist — although he could become positively fluent after a good meal and a cognac.

He stumbled through his greeting, again acutely conscious of what he was sure were the contemptuous eyes of the bilingual Swiss policemen, and made up for it by wringing his friend’s hand firmly and beaming at him.

‘I am delighted to see you once more, my friend,’ said Janet. ‘What do you think of our little bit of detective work, eh? And even,’ he added, waving his hand at the still silent Swiss, ‘persuading these secretive folk to let us look in one of the vaults! Not bad for an old Frenchman.’

As they were led down the stairs and through a series of gleaming steel gates towards the deposit boxes, Bottando congratulated his colleague on his swiftness and fortune. ‘Fortune, poof! Good police work. Research, interviews, careful questioning. Well, perhaps some luck. But only a little.’

Bottando confessed that he didn’t think there would be much in the box to interest him. ‘After all, our icons disappeared nine years ago. The chances of him having kept one as a souvenir are a bit slight — even if he did take them.’

‘I, also, do not expect a treasure trove. But who knows? It is a pity he died so inconsiderately. A brief conversation would have been very interesting.’

Playing the Gallic extrovert with gusto, a role he habitually adopted when dealing with any sort of foreigner, Janet rubbed his hands together with theatrical anticipation as the heavily armed security guard took out a key and inserted it in the door of a large steel box, one of about a hundred in the room they had entered. Bottando noted that most of the owners were probably under the impression that theirs was the only key to their box, and that whatever they chose to keep in it was absolutely safe from either theft or, sometimes worse, examination. Another example of Swiss duplicity, he thought.

Morneau’s box was about two feet square and three feet long, with a door of angled sheet steel two inches thick. As one of the Swiss policemen had told them on the way down, it was one of the most expensive types he could have rented, and cost ten thousand Swiss francs a year. That in itself, he added, suggested that there should be something interesting inside.

He was wrong. There were no stolen icons, no convenient address books containing the names of icon collectors, no sets of accounts detailing payments received, nothing at all that would get the investigation any further along. But there was a lot of money: some half million Swiss francs, at least fifty thousand dollars in small denomination notes, and the same amount again in Deutschmarks and sterling. All in all, about four hundred thousand dollars in loose currency. Apart from that, the only contents were a bundle of sketchbooks, well-thumbed and spattered with blobs of paint, bound up with a length of red tape. While the money was being taken out and counted, and sets of serial numbers taken down so that attempts could be made to trace their origin, Flavia sat down in a quiet corner — she had been largely ignored all morning and had barely spoken a word since they landed — and flicked through the sketchbooks.

Some of them were clearly many years old, and were full of details of arms and legs, different types of faces and costume, the sort of thing that every art student at one of the more traditional painting academies is required to turn out. She remembered that, in the thirties, Morneau had been at the prestigious Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris and had made the beginnings of a promising career as a painter before turning to the more financially rewarding business of dealing. He had also taught in Lyons before going commercial. As she looked at the sketches with a critical eye, she could see why. He was very skilled, and the line drawings particularly were executed with ease and dexterity. But they were old-fashioned in the extreme, and almost entirely derivative. Dredging up the remnants of her education, she spotted drawings after Rembrandt, legs copied from Parmigianino, endless repetitions of fragments from the Sistine Chapel, all done with minute changes as the artist experimented to see what the painters had been doing.

Intermingled with the sketches were voluminous jottings. The notes were probably part of the dreary lectures in art history that were churned out until the riots of 1968 produced a revolution in methods. The new way didn’t produce any better painters, but it was probably less boring. Recipes for paints, quotations from artists, extracts from books on techniques, all written in a fast, ill-formed hand that was often barely legible. The other books, many in better condition than the first, were of the same type. The newest were the three at the top of the pile and, once more, followed the same pattern.

Flavia decided that recognition of painterly style was merely a matter of keeping the eye practised. In the first volume she examined she had had to concentrate hard to tell even Rubens from Correggio. Now, after only a few minutes, the recognition was coming much faster and more easily.

She looked again, concentrating hard, and then glanced up to confirm that the five men were still busy talking to each other and were ignoring her very existence. She slipped three of the books in the black leather handbag that everyone in her office always made fun of for being so absurdly large and unladylike, bound the rest in the red cotton tape, and replaced them on the table with the bundles of money.

Forty-five minutes later, the two Italians and the Frenchman were sitting in a restaurant ordering food. Lunch had been Flavia’s idea, and it had been taken up enthusiastically by her superiors, if for different reasons. There had been a polite disagreement about where to go. Janet had suggested an Italian trattoria, Bottando had returned the compliment by insisting that they go French. Because he was very much of the opinion that this was by far the best decision, Janet had let himself be persuaded, but made up for his chauvinism by ordering a bottle of Montepulciano, which he considered one of the few Italian wines that might deservedly have been produced in his home country.

He took an appreciative sip then asked, ‘Well, my friends, and what is it that I can do for you?’

Bottando looked surprised. ‘For us? What makes you think we want something?’

‘I do apologise, but I’m sure one of you does. I am a thoughtful person, and observant. And I know you well. You are a polite man, and you were very rude in disposing of those Swiss so that you could eat alone in my company. I am flattered, and I know your opinion of our Swiss colleagues. But you could have asked me earlier and made it less obvious. So, I think to myself, you want to ask me something that has only just occurred to you. And the invitation came after that whispering in your ear from your assistant here. Therefore...’