Free The Bernini Bust by Iain Pears Page B

a bat. It was one of those days.
    A youngish man, the maid said, which was a start, but then she pointed at the colonel, a man in his late fifties, and said that maybe he was the same age as the master. Tactically acute though; Alberghi was quite pleased.
    After much patient questioning, Flavia established that the purported art dealer was between thirty and sixty, medium height, and had no distinguishing features she could remember.
    “Hair?” she asked.
    That’s right, she said. He had some.
    “I mean, what colour?”
    She shook her head. No idea.
    Marvellous. Flavia snapped her notebook shut, stuffed it back in her bag and said she was going to go.
    “Frankly, Colonel, I think you can wave goodbye to your pieces. We pick stuff up every now and then, and when we do, we’ll give you a call. Apart from that, the only thing I can recommend is that you keep your eye on auction sale catalogues, in case you see something you recognise. If you do, let us know.”
    Alberghi, with a sudden spurt of regimental courtesy, swept ahead to open the door for her as she left. The gesture was spoilt by a noisy yapping sound and a heartfelt, military style stream of cursing as a tiny dog ran in and almost swept him off his feet. This was evidently the ferocious animal advertised on the gate.
    “Get that beast out of here,” he instructed the maid. “Which one is it, anyway?”
    The old woman, with remarkable agility, pounced on the animal, swept it into her bosom and cradled it gently. “There, there,” she said, and patted it on its head. “This one is Brunelleschi, sir. The one with a white spot and the clouding eyes.”
    “Horrid little things,” he said, eyeing it like someone wondering how it would do as a pot roast.
    “It seems quite sweet,” Flavia said, noting that the old lady’s hearing and eyesight weren’t so bad after all. “Odd name, though.”
    “My uncle’s,” he said mournfully. “Otherwise I’d get rid of them. Arty type, as you know, so gave his dogs stupid names. Other one’s called Bernini.”
    “Oh, good,” said Bottando as Flavia arrived back in the office at slightly after nine. She was planning to dump her notes on the desk for typing up the next morning, then go home for a long bath and an evening’s self-indulgent misery in front of the television. There was never anything worth watching, which made it an even more appropriate way of wasting time. “I was hoping you’d come back. Got something for you.”
    She looked at him with cautious disapproval. He had on his air of amiable benevolence, which generally meant having to do something she’d rather avoid.
    “What is it now?”
    “Well, I thought of you, you see,” he said. “Because of your friend Argyll. Just the person, I thought.”
    There was, at the moment, no surer way of irritating Flavia than to think of her because of Jonathan Argyll, so she sniffed loudly, got on with rearranging papers on her desk and tried to ignore him.
    “This murder, and theft. The one in Los Angeles. It’s causing quite a stir, you know. Even made the evening news. Did you see it?”
    Flavia pointed out that she’d spent the last few hours wasting time talking to military idiots in the countryside, not idling away in her office with her feet up. Bottando brushed the comment aside.
    “Quite. The point is that the police there have been on the phone. A man called Morelli. Speaks Italian, surprisingly. Just as well, otherwise I’d have had enormous difficulties understanding him…’
    “Well?”
    “They want us to pick up their prime suspect. A man called di Souza, do you know him?”
    As patiently as possible, Flavia said she didn’t.
    “I’m surprised. He’s been around for years. Awful old fraud. Anyway, it seems he and Moresby were having a row about a Bernini that di Souza smuggled out of the country. Moresby dead, Bernini gone and di Souza, so they reckon, on the next plane back to Italy. It gets into Rome in about an hour, and they