Free The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears Page B

vanished again. Paolo looked at the door. ‘He seems very edgy these days. I think he’s still worrying about how to avoid landing in it if anything goes wrong with that damn painting. Don’t know why. In the last few weeks he’s surrounded this department with more defences and bureaucratic outworks than Fort Knox.’
    Flavia shrugged. ‘Maybe. Still, that reminds me of something I wanted to tell him. It might make him relax a bit.’
    She went up the stairs, walked through his door without knocking, as usual, and sat herself on his armchair. She summarised the meeting swiftly, then briefly ran over Argyll’s tale about his researches.
    ‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ she ended lamely. Bottando had his Silly-Little-Woman look on his face. He rarely used it, especially on her. ‘What do you think should be done about it?’ she said.
    ‘Nothing. File it and forget it. Better still, don’t even file it. I’m much too old to go looking for trouble, andthe very thought of telling the curator of the National Museum that he might have an old copy on his hands makes my pension start to shrink before my very eyes.’
    ‘But we should do something, surely? A quiet warning, a little suggestion?’
    ‘My dear, if you didn’t have me to protect you you’d be eaten alive. Now be sensible and think. The minister of defence is a Socialist, correct? And the arts minister is a Christian Democrat. And they don’t like each other. Now, an old southern Socialist under this Socialist defence minister lets out the word that the arts minister has goofed in a big way. Do they say “thank you for the warning, good of you to tell us?” Not likely. They suspect a conspiracy by the minority parties in the government to nobble their newly rising star and bring the DCI into disrepute. But they look anyway, discover the picture is genuine, and one ageing general, looking forward to his retirement, is wheeled out on to the scaffold to restore peace and harmony in the coalition. Preceded, I might add, by his very best assistant who is a notorious member of the Communist Party…’
    ‘No I’m not. Membership’s lapsed.’
    ‘Ex-member,’ her boss amended, ‘who is exactly the sort of person who would come up with a naïve plot to undermine the government.’
    ‘But what if it really isn’t genuine?’
    ‘If it isn’t, they have a scandal on their hands. But we keep out of it, stand on the sidelines and watch. Our job is to protect that painting, not to run around causing trouble. And whatever evidence we produce will haveto be very, very persuasive. You remember that Watteau that caused all the fuss a few years ago?’
    Flavia nodded.
    ‘Pronounced as genuine by everyone, and sold to the States for a fortune. And what happens? Someone writes an article saying it’s a fake. Says that if you look in the background you can see the word “Merde” written clear as day. I’ve seen it myself, he is quite right. The painting popped up from nowhere, it has no history, no one has ever mentioned it before. It’s ninety-five per cent certain it’s a phoney. But who admits it? Not the museum, which paid three million dollars, not the art dealer who might have to give the money back, and not the critics and historians, who have already said how wonderful it is. So there it stays, despite clear and conclusive evidence that it’s a monstrous hoax.
    ‘Now you come to our Raphael, which cost twenty-five times as much, and has a history that can be traced back to the artist’s brush. If it was a phoney the head of the National Museum would have to resign, and his patron; the minister, would have to go too, because he appropriated this purchase as his idea.’ He walked over to the window and stared out of it onto the façade of San Ignazio opposite.
    ‘And he would have to be replaced, and the Socialists, the Liberals, the Republicans and all of them would demand that they be given his ministry because he had made such a mess. And