Giotto's hand
Fifth in the Italian art-history crime series featuring English dealer and sleuth Jonathan Argyll, from the author of the best-selling masterpiece ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’.
When the letter first arrived at the offices of Rome’s Art Theft Squad, General Bottando thought it was just another deranged demand from a demented art fan. But the mysterious correspondent is a woman who claims to know about a painting that was stolen over thirty years ago—and Bottando believes the theft was just one in a series of clever heists masterminded by an elusive thief he’s dubbed “Giotto”.
Anxious to outwit the conniving colleague who’s plotting his professional destruction, Bottando sends the beautiful Flavia di Stefano to investigate. Flavia quickly uncovers a possible culprit—but when her art-dealer boyfriend Jonathan Argyll travels to England to question him, the suspect is very suspiciously dead…
PRAISE FOR THE OTHER
Art History Mysteries
BY IAIN PEARS
THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR
“[As] mystery. The Raphael Affair is very good; as cultural explication, it is superlative.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Presents a world the author knows well in the satisfying way Margaret Truman and Dick Francis set their mysteries in milieus they know…” —Associated Press
“Masterful and calls for an encore.” —Houston Post
“A better debut could hardly have been made,” —Chronikles
“Impressive.” —The (London) Times
“A felicitous first.” —The (London) Guardian
“[A] clever thriller… Pears balances politics, love and danger nicely in a plot that has a cunning and satisfactory outcome.” —The Sunday Times (London)
THE TITIAN COMMITTEE
“Mr. Pears does some lovely brushwork on the minor characters who contribute to the subtle tones of this elegant mystery… but the real work of art here is the plot, a piece of structural engineering any artist would envy.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Light and sassy… Agatha would have loved it.” —Los Angeles Times
“Writes with a Beerbohm-like wit.” —Publishers Weekly
THE BERNINI BUST
“As charming as its title—well paced, witty and full of details that speak to his training as an art historian.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Art history, literary language and wry humor realize another auspicious combination.” —Library Journal
“The cleverest entry yet in this deliciously literate series.” —Kirkus Reviews
THE LAST JUDGEMENT
“Clever and entertaining… Pears knows what he is talking about and tells a rollicking good yarn.” —The Boston Globe
“A sophisticated, adventurous, and gripping story that is sure to hold wide appeal.” —Booklist
“The latest (mis)adventure of art historian Jonathan Argyll delivers its plot twists at a rapid clip right up to the closing pages… Pears keeps his readers well occupied.” —Publishers Weekly
“‘The Last Judgement is a joy for readers who enjoy a complex plot set to clever dialogue with the often nefarious goings-on of the international art market as a backdrop.” —St. Petersburg Times
“A witty, exceptionally brilliant puzzler.” —The Sunday Times (London)
DEATH AND RESTORATION
“Pears writes delightfully witty, elegant, well-informed crime novels.” —The (London) Times
“Pears’ tremendous affection for Rome comes through strongly, making the city one of the most engaging characters.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“The book dances with sunlight and colour, faded patinas and shifting standards, with humour and knowledge making easy companions.” —Mail on Sunday
GIOTTO’S HAND
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with
Scribner
PRINTING HISTORY
G.K. Hall and Co., U.S.A./Chivers Press, U.K., edition / 1994
Scribner edition (U.S.) / 1998
HarperCollins edition (U.K.) / 1998
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / March 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994 by Iain Pears.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 0-425-17358-5
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published
by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME
design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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Table of Contents
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Also by Iain Pears
GIOTTO’S HAND
1
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 th
e 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.”
“It sounds quite a good idea to me,” she said, settling herself on the sofa and placing the file by her side. “Are you sure you were wrong?”
“Oh, in theory there was nothing wrong with it at all. Which just shows what’s wrong with theory. The trouble was, once I began to think about it, I realized I now had one man, who I dubbed Giotto…”
“Why?”
Bottando smiled. “Because my imaginary character was a real master at his trade, of great importance, but we knew virtually nothing about him. No personality or anything. A bit like Giotto. But, as I say, I had made this creation of mine responsible for more than two dozen thefts from at least 1963 onwards. Encompassing four different countries, in each case taking unphotographed pictures which were never seen again. Without anyone in a dozen or more specialized police units even suspecting his existence. Without a single fence or buyer ever breaking ranks and offering information. Without a single work ever being recovered.”
“Hmm.”
“And then, of course, the whole thing blew up when I came across a note from the Carabinieri saying they’d arrested someone six months previously for another job which I’d nominally pencilled in as being by Giotto’s hand. Giacomo Sandano. Remember him?”
“The world’s worst thief?”
“That’s the one. He nicked a Fra Angelico from Padua. Got caught, of course. According to my calculations, he would have been three and a half when he committed the Straga raid, and is far too stupid ever to get away with anything for long. This is why I put the whole lot in the extinct box. It was the best proof imaginable that I was wrong. So Giotto has been gathering dust for a couple of years and, in my opinion, should return there…”
“Good morning. General.”
The door opened and the voice entered before the small and compact body from which it emerged. A moment later, a man who looked surprisingly like a well-fed Siamese cat entered the room, with a look of superior amusement on his face. Bottando smiled back genially, with an expression that connoisseurs like Flavia knew to be
entirely false.
“Good morning, dottore.” he said. “How nice to see you.”
Dottore Corrado Argan was one of those people that large-scale organizations periodically create for the sole purpose of making the lives of its several members virtually intolerable. He had started off as an art historian—thus giving himself somewhat dubious intellectual credentials which he played on mercilessly—then, finding the Italian and international university system far too sensible to give him a post, had gravitated into the bureaucracy, specifically the beni artistici, the amorphous body which keeps its eye on the national heritage.
After successfully creating chaos in several areas of that fine organization’s activities, he had become suffused with indignation over the way bits of the national heritage kept on going missing, and decided that what the fight against crime really needed to make it effective was the stimulus of his own powerful intellect to focus its activities.
He was not the first to imagine he might make a difference and, to give him very grudging credit, he was certainly enthusiastic. That, of course, mainly had the effect of making him more tiresome. Bottando was well-practised in dealing with periodic memoranda from outsiders demanding action, suggesting campaigns and recommending policies. Long experience had taught him the best way of agreeing profoundly with all interventions, thanking their authors and then ignoring them totally.
What he was not capable of dealing with too well was the outsider moving in, taking over office space and settling down for an extended stay to write reports based on a day-to-day monitoring of activities. Which was what the loathsome Argan had done. For six months now he had read his way through files, sat in on meetings, pipe in mouth, supercilious smile on face, making notes that no one was allowed to see and muttering things about how the department did not conceptualize its policies in a sufficiently holistic fashion.