the Campo dei Fiori rang and want to bring someone around,’ she told him. ‘They arrested him last night breaking into a church on their patch and they say he has an odd story to tell. They seem to think it is more in our line of business.’
She spoke in the harsh, nasal accent of the north-west. Bottando had hired her direct from the university at Turin, and she had abandoned a graduate degree to come to Rome. She always maintained that she would finish it eventually, and used this as her main reason for not joining the police fulltime. But she worked so hard in the department that it seemed very unlikely. She had the fair hair and light skin of many northern Italians. Even if she hadn’t been simply but definitely beautiful, her hair would have made her stand out in Rome.
‘Did they say what it’s about?’
‘No. Just something about a picture. They reckon he may be a bit crazy.’
‘What does he speak?’
‘English and some Italian. I don’t know how much.’
‘In that case you will have to talk to him. You know what my English is like. Let me know if he has anything interesting to say.’
Flavia made a mock salute, two fingers of her left hand pressed briefly against the fringe of meticulously disarranged hair that edged half-way down her forehead. Both of them wandered into their respective offices, she to the small, cramped one she shared with three others, he to the more luxurious one, decorated almost entirely with more stolen objects, on the third floor.
Bottando settled down and went through the morning ritual of going through the mail left on his desk in a neat pile by his secretary. Normal nonsense. He shook his head sadly, sighed heavily, and tipped the entire pile into the bin.
Two days later, a bulky document awaited him on his desk. It was the fruit of Flavia’s interrogations of the prisoner brought round by the carabinieri, and bore all the hallmarks of her conscientiousness. On top of it was a little note: ‘I think you’ll like this one – F.’ In principle, the interview should have been conducted by a full policeman, but Flavia had swiftly switched into English and gained control of the proceedings. As Bottando flipped through the pages, he realised that the man clearly spoke Italian quite well. But the policeman on duty was fairly dull and probably would have missed almost everything of interest.
The document was a condensed transcript of the interview, the sort of thing that is sent along to the prosecutor’s office if the police think a case can be made. Bottando got himself an espresso from the machine in the corridor – he was an addict of many years’ standing who now could not even get to sleep at night without a last-minute caffeine fix – put his feet up and began to read.
For the first few pages there was little of any interest. The prisoner was English, aged twenty-eight and a graduate student. He was in Rome on holiday and had been arrested for vagrancy when found apparently trying to sleep in the church of Santa Barbara near the Campo dei Fiori. Nothing had been stolen and no damage reported by the parish priest.
All this took five pages, and Bottando was wondering why his department had been called in and why the carabinieri had bothered arresting him. Sleeping rough was hardly a major offence. Throughout the summer months, foreigners could be found snoring away on almost every bench and in every open space in the city. Sometimes they had no money, sometimes they were too drunk or too drugged to get back to their pensione, just as often there was not an empty hotel room for miles and they had no choice.
But as he flipped over the next page he became more interested. The prisoner, one Jonathan Argyll, informed the interrogators that he had gone to the church not to camp out, but to examine a Raphael over the altar. Moreover, he insisted on making a full statement because an enormous fraud had taken place.
Bottando paused. Raphael? The man clearly was off his head. He couldn’t remember the church very well but was convinced that he knew the location of every Raphael in the country. If there was one in a tiny little church like Santa Barbara, he would know about it. He walked to the computer and switched on. When the machine had hummed and whirred itself into readiness he went into the database that had been built up giving the locations of likely targets for thieves. He typed ‘Roma’, and, when it asked for more details, specified ‘chiesi’. He then typed in the name of the church. The machine instantly told him that Santa Barbara had only six objects that were potentially stealable. Three were bits of silver, one was a seventeenth-century vulgate Bible with an embossed leather binding, and two were pictures. But neither was a Raphael nor likely to be confused with one. Both, in fact, were very second-rate affairs that no thief worth his salt would waste his time stealing. The market for purloined, nine-foot by six-foot crucifixions by anonymous Roman painters was not exactly buoyant. Nor could he see much demand in the illicit international art trade for the altarpiece – a Landscape with the Repose on the Flight to Egypt by the magnificently mediocre eighteenth-century painter Carlo Mantini.
Going back to his desk, he read on for a few more lines, convinced that by ‘interesting’, Flavia merely meant that her document was yet another demonstration of the foolishness of mankind. She was very strong on this interpretation of human nature, especially as far as art collectors were concerned. Several times the department had abandoned the hunt for a minor work when they discovered that it had been bought – as a Michelangelo, Titian, Caravaggio or whatever – by a wealthy foreign collector with more money than sense. To get their revenge they wrote to the buyer informing him that he had been cheated, and passed on word to the local police. But, on the whole, they considered the humiliation the man would suffer was adequate punishment, and generally the work was too unimportant to go to all the trouble and expense of international arrest warrants and deportation orders.
So perhaps this fifty-page document simply catalogued the delusions of an unbalanced moron who had persuaded himself he could get rich quick? A few more glances rapidly persuaded him there was more to it than that. From being a question-and-answer session, the document settled into a sustained narrative, the result of a lengthy statement. Bottando read on, and became more puzzled:
‘…studying for a degree based on a dissertation about Mantini. During my research, I discovered a series of documents that proved beyond any doubt that Mantini earned money by working for art dealers in Rome in the 1720s and had taken part in a sizeable fraud. You mustn’t think that Italy’s restrictions on exports of works of art are new. Most old states had them even back in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century they were becoming onerous. The Papal States in particular were getting poorer, and lots of foreigners were coming here wanting to buy. So, various routes were worked out to bypass the regulations. The most usual was the most obvious: a series of judicious bribes. Pictures were also temporarily reattributed to some obscure painter, until an export licence was given. Occasionally, dealers would go so far as to cut the picture into fragments, ship it to London or Paris, then reassemble and repair it.
‘The more important the painting, the more difficult it was to get it out of the country. I suppose that is also true now. And the most difficult of all were those by – or thought to be by – the great triumvirate of the Renaissance: Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Several times dealers or collectors bought works by one of these artists, asked the papacy for permission to export, and were turned down. In many cases the pictures are still here. So, when the di Parma family wanted to sell their most valuable possession, something illicit was clearly needed if they were to collect the money.
‘The di Parmas had been a great family, one of the most powerful in central Italy. Like many others they had fallen on hard times, and when the Earl of Clomorton offered to buy their Raphael for an outrageous sum they agreed. To get it out of the country, they enlisted the aid of an English art dealer called Samuel Paris, and he turned to Mantini for extra assistance.
‘The routine they came up with was
