Iain Pears - The Immaculate Deception

To Michael and Alexander

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Title Page Iain Pears The Immaculate Deception

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One morning, a fine May morning in Rome, when the sun was beaming through the clouds of carbon monoxide and dust and giving a soft, fresh feel to the day, Flavia di Stefano sat immobile in a vast traffic jam which began in the Piazza del Popolo and ended somewhere near the Piazza Venezia. Many people, at least those with a different personality to her own, would have been unperturbed by this common occurrence, and would instead have contemplated their surroundings with something approaching patient smugness. Not many, after all, can call on a Mercedes, complete with chauffeur and obligatory tinted windows, to ferry them around town at the taxpayers’ expense. Fewer still at such a young age are the head (if only the acting head) of one of the more reputable departments in the Italian police force, complete with its own budget, personnel and expense accounts.

And virtually none of the small number of departmental potentates use their splendid forms of transport to go to unspecified meetings, called late the previous evening, at the Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of the Italian prime minister.

That, of course, was the problem, and the reason behind Flavia’s insensitivity to the early morning sunshine, and her disdain for all living things. For a start, her collar itched monstrously, and was a permanent, nagging reminder of her own inexperience and desire to create the right impression.

Instead of sitting quietly that morning eating toast and drinking coffee, she had run around showering, choosing clothes and, worst of all, applying copious amounts of make-up. Then having a fit of defiance and taking it all off again, then weakening with nerves and putting it all back on. Worse still, she stood peering out of the window into the little piazza below, anxiously waiting for the car to arrive, checking and re-checking the contents of her handbag. She had nightmare visions of grabbing her coat and running through the streets of Rome to get there. Breaking a heel on a cobblestone. Arriving out of breath, her hair in a mess. Creating entirely the wrong impression. Career destroyed, over in a moment, just because some damn fool driver didn’t turn up. And, what was more, she felt ill; stomach in a turmoil, the rest of her queasy. Bug. Flu, probably. Nervousness. Something like that. It was going to be one of those days. She knew it.

‘Flavia. Do stop jiggling about like that. You’re making me nervous.’ Jonathan Argyll, her husband of four weeks’ standing, and boyfriend-cum-flatmate of near ten years, sat at the kitchen table trying to read the newspaper. ‘It’s only the prime minister, you know.’

Flavia turned round to scowl at him.

‘I’m not being facetious,’ he went on calmly as he reached for the marmalade before she could tell him what she thought of his sense of whimsy. ‘You know as well as I do that bad news is always handed out by underlings. Besides, you haven’t done anything wrong recently, have you? Not misplaced a Raphael, dropped a Michelangelo, shot a senator, or anything?’

Another scowl.

‘There you are, then. Nothing to worry about,’ he continued, getting up to give her a quick pat to indicate that he sympathized. ‘Even less now that your car has arrived.’

He pointed downwards, waved cheerfully at the driver, whom he vaguely recognized, and even more cheerfully at Flavia, as she rushed for her bag and coat.

‘Calm. Remember?’ he said as she opened the door.

‘I remember.’

Calm, she repeated to herself thirty minutes later as she looked at her watch one more time. Stuck in a traffic jam, half a mile to go, five minutes late. At least it cut the unaccustomed car sickness. Calm, she thought.

It was Bottando’s fault, really, she reflected. Her erstwhile boss, now gone on to greater things, was one of those who liked formulating universal laws about life, which he delivered as aphorisms that came back to haunt you at inappropriate moments.

‘Politicians,’ he said once over a glass of brandy following a long lunch. ‘Politicians can ruin your day. Ministers, on the other hand, can ruin your week.’

‘And prime ministers?’ Flavia had asked.

‘Prime ministers? Oh, they can ruin your life.’

His little bon mot, for some reason, didn’t seem quite so urbane at the moment. She considered leaning forward to see if the driver could go any faster, but abandoned the idea. Another one of Bottando’s rules. Never let anyone see you are nervous; especially not drivers, who are notoriously the biggest gossips on the planet. So, like a condemned man who finally realizes his fate is inevitable, she gave a big sigh, leant back and gave up fretting. Immediately, the lights changed, the cars began moving and the palazzo came into sight. She was waved through the vast wooden gates into the courtyard with virtually no delay, and within minutes was being ushered into an ante-room to an ante-room to the office where Antonio Sabauda, prime minister now for a whole nine months, held his audiences. Fourteen minutes late.

Her guardian angel was on duty, working hard on her behalf. Sabauda was later still, and over the next forty minutes she allowed herself to work up a fine head of steam about the lack of consideration shown by unpunctual people. In fact, by the time the door was finally opened and she was shown in, the nervousness was gone, the deference dissipated, the stomach quiescent, and her character quite restored to its normal state.

So she marched into the surprisingly dingy office thinking only how stupid she had been to put on quite so much lipstick and wishing she hadn’t bothered, shook hands with the prime minister in an uninterested fashion, and sat down on a chair before she was asked. What did she care? She hadn’t voted for him.

He scored early points by referring neither to her age, nor to the fact that she was a woman, and then pushed his rating even higher by not indulging in any small-talk. Then he spoiled it all by expressing surprise that Bottando himself had not come. Flavia reminded him that she, not General Bottando, was now running the department on a day-to-day basis.

‘But he is still the head of it, is he not?’

‘Nominally. But he takes no active role in our operations any more. He is running this European venture, and that uses up all his time.’

‘And more of his patience,’ the prime minister added for her with a faint smile. ‘I see. And I am sure we are in safe hands with you, signora. I do hope so, anyway. I’m afraid there is something of a crisis on hand. I would tell you about it myself, but I know few of the details. Dottore Macchioli knows those, and he has just arrived. This, I’m afraid, is why you have been kept waiting for so long.’

Of course, Flavia thought. All was now clear. Guglio Macchioli was one of those endearingly lovable characters who sow disaster everywhere they go. Never on time for anything, however much he tried, always colliding with all manner of inanimate objects which leapt out at him as he passed, he was the very model of the unworldly scholar. And as a scholar he was very fine indeed, so Jonathan told her, as he knew more about this sort of thing than she did. But as the director of the National Museum he was, in Bottando’s opinion, one of the wonders of the world. His elevation had come on the rebound; his predecessor had been go-getting, dynamic, determined to drag the musty museum into modernity and was shortly to be let out of gaol. The embarrassment had been considerable, and Macchioli – who could not only resist temptation but probably wouldn’t even notice he was being tempted – had seemed the obvious successor, in the circumstances. A safe pair of hands; back to the traditional values of connoisseurship, erudition and old-time curating. A universally beloved figure, in fact, but quite incapable of defending his patch against the incursions of bureaucrats who wished to cut his funds, to ooze up to potential benefactors, or to manage his disorganized museum.