“When she has it, let me know, and again stick to her like glue. If you don’t, if you lose her, then we will blow the whole thing. I want to see her with the icon, I want to see her hand it to Charanis, and I want to see him take it.”
“Will she give it to him directly?”
“I doubt it. If she goes into any building and comes out, wait till she emerges. One person follow her, the other should go in and find out what she’s been doing. She’ll probably put it in a safe place for him to collect. She will assume she’s being followed, so be ready. I want to use her to lure Charanis into the open, then I want him arrested. Simple enough. But he is a dangerous man. The carabinieri will have an eight-man team of their flat-foot thugs on call in their little blue trucks waiting for the call once we know where he is. They want him more than we do, and will make the arrest. Our job is to find him. Got that?”
They nodded. “Good. Now, Mary Verney is in her hotel room. You, Giulia, will watch the lobby, and Paolo will back you up on the street outside. All of you take mobile phones and let us pray to God the things work. I’ll want you two”—she gestured at the only other two people she’d been able to rustle up—“to stay at either end of the via Barberini. If she gets out, one of you must see her. Please.”
They all nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Giulia was still young enough to be eager; the rest merely saw a long boring night ahead of them.
Then Flavia walked to the via di Montoro and Menzies’s apartment, where she found the American hard at work and Argyll slumbering on the floor. It was more comfortable than the sofa.
The icon, the Hodigitria, rested on an easel angled so that it caught the light. It was a small work, as Argyll had described, so dark that she had to peer at it to make out the slightly imperious face as it gazed distantly out of the old, worm-eaten block of wood it was painted on. Even though she knew it was a fake, she was strangely impressed, and could imagine the effect of the real thing in a darkened church, in its gold and jewelled frame and surrounded by banks of candles lit by devotees.
Something about the size, she thought. Small and understated, which is always more impressive than the vast and overblown.
But represented by a copy in a state of undress, so to speak, without frame or altar or smell of incense, it scarcely looked worth the trouble it was causing. And wouldn’t have done, even if parts weren’t missing, and even if the wet paint on the rest hadn’t brilliantly reflected the evening sun.
“Oh, God,” she said. “It’ll never be ready.”
Menzies was not pleased by the remark, and scowled at her. “If I may point out, I’ve only been working on it for four hours. I’m doing bloody well, thank you. And it will be ready in time. So you do your business and leave me to mine. Look.”
He took it off the easel and turned it round delicately. “Old oak, an eighth of an inch thick. Filthy, and covered in dust. I had to cut it myself from a piece of the stalls in San Giovanni; which meant going there and finding something suitable. Only fifteenth century, but it’ll have to do. Then the cut edges had to be dirtied up and darkened, and that took a long time. Then I had to paint the thing from memory. The painting used some form of tar as a base, and it was bubbling up and showing through the paint; getting that effect—”
“All right, all right,” she said. “I’m just worrying. Will it be done?”
“How long do I have?”
“Until about eight tomorrow morning, I guess.”
He grimaced, calculated, then said: “It’ll be done. Could well be my finest work. Certainly my fastest.”
“Pity no one will ever know.”
“The greatest artists were anonymous ones. No one knew who painted the original, either. Anyway, if you’ll keep quiet …”
He worked again in silence for a while, as Flavia paced around the room, peering at the panel every few minutes, until Menzies’s patience snapped.
“Look, go away. You’re not helping my concentration at all. Go and get a coffee; read a newspaper, or something. And take your friend with you. His snoring disturbs me.”
“What a nerve,” Argyll said a few minutes later. “I helped him at the monastery, wielding his saw and collecting dust from behind the organ pipes; I’ve mixed paints and pounded powders and stuck my head up the chimney to get wood soot and brewed it up in ethanol for the backing. I’ve hardly had a moment’s rest since I got there.”
He drank a coffee down in one gulp and ordered another. “Great fun, though, I must say. Being a forger must be very rewarding. How did you persuade him to be so cooperative? Are you sure it will work?”
Flavia shrugged. Faking a painting in under twelve hours was not difficult; especially as Charanis had only a hazy idea of what it looked like, had never seen it out of its frame and because it was dirty almost beyond recognition. But it was too much to hope that he could ever fool an expert, or indeed fool anyone for very long, though she hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. A few minutes would be enough. Subtleties, like getting exactly the right style, or trying to achieve the serenity of the original, were unnecessary for Charanis. But he wasn’t the person who had to be fooled. Mary Verney would be more difficult.
And it was a pity they couldn’t have used a professional, rather than Menzies. Someone like Bruno Mascholino, for example, would have been delighted to help, in exchange for a month or two off his sentence, and would have done a much better job. But he didn’t know what to paint; only Menzies had studied the thing with any amount of care, when he was thinking about his restoration job. So, despite the disadvantages, he was the only person who could help. And even persuading him had been hard work.
“I told him I would issue a statement totally exonerating him from any involvement in this business; criticize the press for being vindictive and use all Bottando’s influence with the Beni Artistici to get him the Farnesina contract.”
“Not a bad bargain. Is he the right person for the job?”
“He can make that ceiling look like Walt Disney for all I care at the moment. I don’t even know if he’s the right person for this job. But he is the only one. What do you think?”
Argyll scratched his chin and pondered for a moment. “It might work,” he said cautiously. “As he says, his great advantage is the dirt. And the fact that no one involved has ever seen it out of its frame, and that Mary Verney will assume it’s just been restored by a total philistine. I’m coming to think he’s not quite such a slash and burn man as they say. He’s got a delicate touch. In fact, I’ve quite grown to like him. He’s an awkward sod, but not nearly as repellent as he seems. We had quite a nice long chat, in between the pounding and the sawing.”
“Good,” Flavia said sarcastically. “I’m glad you managed to squeeze in a bit of the old male bonding. But will he finish in time? That’s the only thing that concerns me at the moment.”
Argyll thought, then nodded. “I think so. It’s become a challenge. There might be a few rough edges, but he’ll finish. I hope.”
Mikis rang the next morning, and Mary followed instructions dutifully, and with some trepidation. The usual phone call from Louise had not come through and she was sick with worry. But she wasn’t going to let him know that. Instead, she calmly put the receiver down, walked out of her room and went to the nearest public phone.
“What about my grandchild?”
“All in good time.”
“Now is a very good time.”