Perhaps he just needed more practice, as his employer suggested. On good days, this is what he liked to think. On bad days, and this was one of them, he was more inclined to think it was not for him.
‘But Signora Pianta, why?’ he asked in an Italian flawed only by the distinct tone of weary desperation. ‘If the terms weren’t satisfactory, why on earth didn’t she say so last month?’
The vulture-faced, mean-minded, vicious-looking old misery smiled in a tight and very unsympathetic fashion. She had a nose of quite alarming dimensions which curved round and down almost like a sabre, and he found himself increasingly fixated on the monstrous protuberance as the meal progressed and the quality of the conversation deteriorated. He had not especially noticed her singularly unappealing appearance before she demanded more money from him, but the shock had stimulated his senses. On the other hand, he had never liked dealing with her, and found the act of enforced gallantry increasingly difficult to sustain.
Very irritating. Especially as Argyll and the old Marchesa had hit it off well. She was a feisty, cunning woman with eyes still bright in her old and lined face, a bizarre sense of humour and a very satisfactory desire to unload some pictures. All was going nicely, more or less. Then she’d fallen ill, and it evidently made her cranky. Since her side-kick – companion, she liked to call herself – had taken over, the negotiations had lurched and sputtered. Now it appeared they were going to grind to a final halt.
‘And I’ve already told you it is quite unnecessary. We are very experienced at this sort of thing.’
Tiresome woman. She had spent the evening elliptically dropping bizarre hints, and eventually he had asked outright what on earth she wanted, apart from switching the deal to a percentage of the sale price rather than a lump sum. That he could deal with, although it would have been nice had she thought of it earlier.
It was the other little detail that upset him. Smuggle the pictures out, she said. Don’t bother with export permits, official regulations and all that nonsense. Stick them in the back of the car, drive to Switzerland and sell them. Get on with it.
It was, of course, not that unusual. Thousands of pictures leave like that from Italy every year, and some of his less respectable colleagues in Rome made a tidy living as couriers. But, as he said firmly, Byrnes Galleries did not work like that. They went by the book, and were good at hurrying officialdom along. Besides, the pictures were relatively unimportant – family pictures, second-rate landscapes, anonymous portraits and the like – and there was no likelihood of any hitches. The price he had offered was not great, admittedly, but as much as they were worth. By the time they were paid for, transported to England, cleaned, prepared and sold, he and his employer would show a respectable profit. Worked out as a rate per hour for the amount of time he’d put in, he could probably earn more selling hamburgers in a fast food chain.
She was upset by his adamant refusal. In that case, she said, he must agree to pay all export taxes and registration fees. Whether she was serious or whether this was all a ploy to get him to agree to her request he did not know, but here he put his foot down.
‘I’ve been through all the figures. We couldn’t possibly sell the pictures, pay all the expenses and make a profit on this percentage. It’s tantamount to calling the entire deal off.’
Signora Pianta smiled and drank the coffee that Argyll, it seemed, was paying for. A meal designed to conclude an amicable deal was becoming an expensive waste of time. Initially, he had felt a certain sympathy for the woman, who had an unenviable position as companion to the sharp-tongued Marchesa. It was now evaporating fast.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said, not meaning it at all. ‘But those were my instructions. And as we have now had more interest in the pictures…’
Argyll was bewildered by this last comment. Who on earth could be interested? Was he about to become involved in a bidding war for these things? If so, it certainly wasn’t worth it. If he wasn’t required occasionally to provide Edward Byrnes in London with some pictures as an exchange for his salary, he would pull out now and go back to Rome.
‘Oh, very well, then,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I’ll think about it and call you tomorrow.’
Cool and professional, he thought. Don’t allow yourself to be stampeded. Keep them guessing. Probably useless, mind you.
From there until the end of the meal he did his best to remain calmly polite. He did all the right things; paid the bill with much silent gnashing of teeth, helped her on with her coat, escorted her out of the restaurant and was kissing her hand – this always seemed to go down well, even when it wasn’t deserved – when he heard a slight cough from someone standing just behind him in the Campo.
He turned round, his bad mood dissipating as he recognised the woman standing there, resting with her weight on her left leg, arms crossed and a look of amused disdain on her face.
‘What are you doing in Venice?’
‘Not having as much fun as you, it seems,’ Flavia replied.
Argyll, thrown into confusion as he was so easily by almost anything unexpected, performed a flustered and not very competent set of introductions. ‘Flavia di Stefano of the Polizia Art Squad in Rome,’ he concluded.
Pianta was not impressed. Indeed, she nodded coldly in the way of someone who did not consider the police respectable members of society, looked disapprovingly at her somewhat scruffy clothes – with particular emphasis on the unpolished brown boots – and then ignored her entirely. She thanked Argyll for the meal in a chilly sort of fashion, which bore no relation to how much it had cost, and walked off.
‘Now there’s a real charmer,’ Flavia remarked calmly as she went.
Argyll rubbed his nose in irritation and frustration. ‘Didn’t seem to like you, did she? Don’t take it personally. It may be because she’s just been asking me to break the law. Besides, she doesn’t like me either, and I’ve just paid for her dinner.’
There was a long silence as he regarded her with a look of affection, which she always interpreted as one of discomfort. It was. He never really quite knew what to do with someone who was both emotionally turbo-charged and also so calm and detached. Somehow the bits never seemed to fit together, or, to put it another way, they obviously did but he couldn’t quite figure out where the joins were.
‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ he asked eventually. ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you. A friendly face, you know.’
‘Thank you,’ she said formally, deciding that he had not been changed by his period of living in Rome. If he didn’t understand her, at least it was mutual. His distant, if obvious, affection tended to confuse her. To her mind, he should either forget her or fling his arms round her. Either would do; but to manage neither seemed merely indecisive. ‘I’m here for a couple of days on a case. Of sorts. Not so interesting.’
‘Oh.’
‘What about you?’
‘Wasting my time, it seems.’
‘Oh.’
Another silence intervened. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she said finally. ‘You look as though you need to ventilate a bit.’
He glanced sideways at her gratefully. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that. You’re starving, I imagine?’
She nodded fervently. ‘Yes.
