He wasn’t entirely certain what to expect. The apartment indicated a reasonable amount of money; Delorme had said that he was American, or Canadian, or something transatlantic. The marketing man for some international company. Muller ran the Italian operation. So he thought.
He did not appear to Argyll to be the epitome of the international salesman; the sort who eyes up whole portions of the world and coolly maps out master strategies for penetrating regions, grabbing market share or cutting out the opposition. For a start, he was at home at ten o’clock in the morning, and Argyll thought such people normally took off only seventeen minutes a day to do things like wash, change, eat and sleep.
Also, he was a little fellow, showing no obvious signs of hard-boiled commercialism. Across a vast middle there were all the indications of decades of eating the wrong sort of food. Arthur Muller was a model of how to die young, with the sort of weight-to-height ratio that makes dieticians wake up in the middle of the night screaming with terror. The type who should have keeled over thirty years before of clogged arteries, if his liver hadn’t got him first.
But there he was, short, fat and with every sign of living to confound the medical statisticians a while longer. On the other hand, his face let the image down a little: although he looked quite pleased to see Argyll standing at his door, parcel in hand, it didn’t exactly light up with glee. The habitual expression seemed almost mournful; the sort of face that didn’t expect much and was never surprised when disaster struck. Most odd; it was almost as if there’d been a mismatch in the assembly process, and Muller’s body had emerged with the wrong head on it.
But he was welcoming enough, at least.
‘Mr Argyll, I imagine. Do come in, do come in. I’m delighted you’re here.’
Not a bad apartment at all. Argyll noted as he walked in, although with definite signs of having been furnished by the company relocation officer. For all that the furniture was corporate good taste, Muller had, none the less, managed to impose a little of his own personality on the room. Not a great collector, alas, but somewhere along the way he had picked up a couple of nice bronzes and a few decent if unexceptional pictures. None of these indicated any great interest in neoclassical, mind you, still less in the baroque pictures cluttering up Flavia’s apartment; but perhaps, Argyll thought to himself hopefully, his tastes were expanding.
He sat down on the sofa, brown paper parcel in front of him, and smiled encouragingly.
‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am you’re here,’ Muller said. ‘I’ve been looking for this picture for some considerable time.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Argyll said, intrigued.
Muller gave him a penetrating, half-amused look, then laughed.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘What you mean to say,’ his client said, ‘was “why on earth would anybody spend time looking for this very ordinary painting? Does he know something I don’t?”’
Argyll confessed that such thoughts had scuttled across his mind. Not that he didn’t like the picture.
‘I’m quite fond of this sort of thing,’ he confessed. ‘But not many other people are. So a friend of mine says. A minority taste, she keeps on telling me.’
‘She may be right. In my case, I haven’t been looking for aesthetic reasons.’
‘No?’
‘No. This was owned by my father. I want to find out something about myself. A filial task, you see.’
‘Oh, right,’ Argyll said, kneeling reverently on the floor and trying to unpick the knot keeping the whole package together. He’d been too conscientious about packing it up again last night. Another where-are-my-roots? man, he thought to himself as he fiddled. A topic to be avoided. Otherwise Muller might offer to show him his family tree.
‘There were four, so I gather,’ Muller went on, watching Argyll’s lack of dexterity with a distant interest. ‘All legal scenes, painted in the 1780s. This is supposed to be the last one painted. I read about them.’
‘You were very lucky to get hold of it,’ Argyll said. ‘Are you after the other three as well?’
Muller shook his head. ‘I think one will suffice. As I say, I’m not really interested in it for aesthetic reasons. Do you want some coffee, by the way?’ he added as the knot finally came undone and Argyll slid the picture out of the packing.
‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ Argyll said as he stood up and heard his knees crack. ‘No, no. You stay there and admire the picture. I can get it.’
So, leaving Muller to contemplate his new acquisition, Argyll headed for the coffee-pot in the kitchen and helped himself. A bit forward, perhaps, but also rather tactful. He knew what these clients were like. It wasn’t simply the eagerness to see what they’d spent their money on; it was also necessary to spend some time alone with the work. To get to know it, person-to-person, so to speak.
He came back to find that Muller and Socrates were not hitting it off as well as he’d hoped. As he was a mere courier he could afford to be a little detached, but he was an amiable soul, and liked people to be happy even when there was no financial gain in it for himself. In his heart, he hadn’t really expected tears of joy to burst forth at the very sight. Even for the aficionado, the painting was not instantly appealing. It was, after all, very dirty and unkempt; the varnish had long since dulled, and it had none of that glossy air of well-cared-for contentment that shines forth from decent pictures in museums.
‘Let me see,’ said Muller non-committally, and he completed his examination, pressing the canvas to see how loose it was, checking the frame for woodworm, examining the back to see how well the stretcher was holding up. Quite professional, really; Argyll hadn’t expected such diligence. Nor had he expected the growing look of disappointment that had spread slowly over the man’s face.
‘You don’t like it,’ he said.
Muller looked up at him. ‘Like it? No. Frankly, I don’t. Not my sort of thing at all. I’d been expecting something a bit more...’
‘Colourful?’ Argyll suggested. ‘Well-painted? Lively? Assured? Dignified? Masterful? Adept?’
‘Interesting,’ Muller said. ‘That’s all. Nothing more. At one stage this was in an important collection. I expected something more interesting.’
‘I am sorry,’ Argyll said sympathetically. He was, as well. There is no disappointment quite so poignant as being let down by a work of art, when your hopes have built up, and are suddenly dashed by being confronted with grim, less-than-you-expected reality. He had felt like that himself on many occasions. The first time he’d seen the Mona Lisa, when he was only sixteen or so, he’d fought through the vast throng in the Louvre with mounting excitement to get to the holy of holies. And, when he arrived, there was this tiny little squit of a picture, hanging on the wall. Somehow it should have been... more interesting than it was. Muller was right. There was no other word for it.
‘You can always hang it in a corridor,’ he suggested.
Muller shook his head.
‘You make me a bit sorry I didn’t allow it to get stolen,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘Then you could have claimed on insurance and got your money back.’
‘What do you mean?’
Argyll explained. ‘As I say, if I’d known you didn’t want it, I’d have told him to take the thing away and welcome to it.’
Somehow his attempts to cheer Muller up didn’t work. The idea of such an easy solution having been missed made him even more introspective.
‘I didn’t realize such a thing might happen,’ he said. Then, jerking himself out of the mood, he went on: ‘I’m afraid I’ve put you to a great deal of trouble for nothing. So I feel awkward about asking you for something else. But would you be prepared to take it off my hands? Sell it for me? I’m afraid I couldn’t stand having this in the house.’