Iain Pears - The Immaculate Deception

‘Ah.’

‘Should these criminals be paid off independently from a private source, a man willing to break the law for what he considers erroneously the public good, then that, of course, I cannot prevent, much though I might regret it.’

‘I see.’

‘You will keep me informed every day about your investigation, and will receive instructions as you proceed. Might I also say that the need for secrecy is absolute.’

‘You are rather tying my hands, here.’

‘I’m sure you will manage.’

‘And if I come across any other way of recovering this picture?’

‘You will restrain yourself. I want no risk at all of this coming into the open.’ He stood up. ‘I think that is all for the time being. Let me know of your progress every day, if you please.’

Two minutes later, both Flavia and Macchioli were in the ante-room once more, she a little perplexed about the whole business, the museum director seemingly lost in despondency.

‘Right, then,’ she said after a while. ‘I think you need to tell me a little more about what on earth has been going on here.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Robbery? Armed man? Remember?’

‘Yes, yes. What do you want to know?’

‘How about how to contact this person? If I am to hand over money to them in some way, I ought to know how to set about it.’

Macchioli looked blank. ‘What do you mean, hand over money? I thought you had just been told that you were to do no such thing?’

She sighed. The trouble with Macchioli was that there was no disingenuousness about him at all. He really did think that they had just sat through a meeting and been given instructions that no money was to be paid. That, of course, might well turn into a major problem.

‘Doesn’t matter. Forget it,’ she said. ‘This message, it gave no means of contact?’

‘No.’

‘Can I see it, please?’

‘It’s in my office.’

It was like talking to a particularly stupid child. ‘Why don’t we go to your office, then?’

‘There,’ he said, forty minutes later, after a silent voyage through the streets of Rome. ‘It’s not very informative.’

Flavia took the piece of paper – no point in worrying about fingerprints or anything like that now – and looked. True enough. She could hardly fault the analysis. Six words only. She even admired the economy of expression.

She leant back in her seat and thought. Did it tell her anything? ‘You’ll be hearing from me.’ Done on a computer printer, but who didn’t have access to one these days? The paper was standard-issue computer paper, of which there were several billion sheets consumed every day. No; it told her nothing; or, at least, nothing that the author didn’t want her to know.

‘The robbery itself,’ she said, turning her attention back to Macchioli.

He shook his head. ‘Very little to say I haven’t already told you. A small truck; the sort that traders use to deliver fruit and vegetables. A man dressed up as Leonardo da Vinci …’

‘What?’ she asked incredulously. He had said it as though people dressed as Renaissance painters or baroque popes were to be seen pottering about the museum every day.

‘One of those masks you buy in party shops. You know. And a sort of cape. And the gun, of course. Do you want to see that?’

She looked at him wearily. Mere expressions of incredulity seemed inadequate, somehow. ‘The gun?’

‘He dropped it when he drove off. Threw it, actually. At the head of the man who helped him load it. This was after he handed out chocolates.’

‘Chocolates?’ she said weakly.

‘Little boxes of chocolates. Belgian ones, I believe. You know, the ones that you buy in speciality shops. With a ribbon on the top.’

‘Of course. Where are they?’

‘What?’

‘The chocolates.’

‘The guards ate them.’

‘I see. Blood sugar levels low because of the shock, no doubt. Apart from that, no violence of any sort?’

‘No.’

‘I’d like to talk to these people in the store room.’

‘You’ll have to.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Someone has to tell them to keep quiet about this.’

‘You haven’t done that?’

‘Of course. But nobody ever listens to me.’

Flavia sighed. ‘Very well, then. Take me to them. Then you can show me the gun.’

She decided on the brutal approach. Not simply because it was one of those days, and she wasn’t feeling in the mood for subtleties, but because she knew that being young and a woman meant that it was sometimes difficult to persuade people – especially the sort of people who unload paintings – to take her seriously.

‘Right,’ she said, when the two men had come in and sat down. ‘I will say this once and once only. I am the head of the art theft squad, investigating the theft of this picture. You two are prime suspects. Got that?’

They didn’t answer but, judging by the way they turned a little pale, she assumed they had.

‘I want it back fast, and more important people than myself want there to be no publicity. If there is any, if anyone hears about what has happened here, and I trace it back to you two, I will personally ensure (a) that you go to gaol for aiding and abetting a crime, (b) that you stay in gaol for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, (c) I will have you fired from this job, and (d) I will ensure that neither of you ever gets a job again. Is that understood?’

More pallor.

‘In order to avoid this regrettable fate, all you have to do is keep your mouths shut. There was no theft, you know of no theft, nothing untoward happened yesterday. You may find that difficult, but you will find the self-discipline rewarding. Do I make myself absolutely clear?’

She was rather proud of the speech, delivered with all the cold conviction of a true apparatchik, able to call on untold occult powers to visit terrible consequences on the innocent. Anyone with a moment’s thought would have seen it was all nonsense, and that there was nothing she could do to them at all, but the two men seemed too dull to notice. She only hoped they were not so dull that they failed to grasp what she wanted of them.

That would become clear in the next few days; what was immediately apparent, alas, was that they were certainly too dim-witted to be much use as witnesses. Their description of the robbery was scarcely more detailed than the brief summary that Macchioli had already given her. The only facts they added were that the van was large enough to get a Claude in, was white, and wasn’t a Fiat. The man involved was of average height and might (or might not) have had a Roman accent. She dismissed them after twenty minutes with another dire warning, then was taken to see the gun.

Macchioli was keeping it in his safe. In a plastic bag. He was inordinately proud of himself about the plastic bag.

‘There,’ he said, putting it gingerly on his desk. ‘We were lucky it didn’t go off when it hit the ground.’

Flavia felt like weeping. Some days were just so abominable she didn’t know how she stood it. She took out her handkerchief, picked up the gun, looked at it for a few moments, then pointed it at her head.

‘Signora! Be careful!’ shouted Macchioli in alarm.

She looked at him sadly, closed her eyes and, to the older man’s horror, slowly pulled the trigger.

The sound of what was later identified by analysts – or rather by a secretary in payroll, who was an enthusiast for opera – as a jaunty version of Verdi’s ‘Teco io sto, Gran Dio’ from Act Two of Un Ballo in Maschera , rendered on a little widget buried deep inside the gun’s handle, drifted slowly across the room.

Flavia opened her eyes, shrugged, and tossed the gun on to the desk.