The Immaculate Deception

10

Trailing after Sabbatini wasn’t, perhaps, quite so important if he hadn’t actually stolen anything to start with, but Flavia had a dogged and thorough strain in her character which propelled her out of her office despite the discouragement and her growing conviction that her stomach was consumed with ulcers so vast in size that she might not survive them.

So she trudged wearily to the lawyers who had been channelling generous sums of money in his direction for so many years, and used her authority, her powers of persuasion and, best of all, her manifest ill-humour, to prise open their lips. And what she learned suddenly made her world terribly complicated again.

Maurizio Sabbatini was the brother-in-law of Guglio di Lanna.

‘How very interesting,’ was her only comment. The lawyer made no response; it was a statement of the obvious.

She thought about it on the way back to the office, and at the same time felt a pang of regret that Bottando was no longer in place to give her his advice. Tangling with the di Lanna family was the sort of thing that required all the help you could lay your hands on.

Not the richest family in Italy, certainly, but currently one of the most powerful, as the do-it-yourself political party that di Lanna had forged out of the wreckage of the past few years of political chaos was currently keeping the government in office. The Party for Democratic Advance – no one knew what that meant, or even whether it was left-wing or right-wing – had only fourteen members in the Chamber of Deputies, but as the government as a whole had a majority of only twelve, its influence was far beyond its nominal strength.

On top of that, di Lanna’s tentacles stretched throughout Italian industry and finance; he owned nothing, controlled little, but through a whole series of investment groups and holding companies he had a stake in almost everything. He had mastered the art of making relatively little go a very long way. He was a powerful man, but with no power base; an illusionist who had vast influence because everyone thought he was influential.

And his brother-in-law was, it seemed, a terrorist who might, in his last days, have turned art thief.

Di Lanna was a deputy and she finally tracked him down in the most unlikely of places, the Chamber of Deputies itself. Except for set-piece occasions when the television cameras are switched on, members of the chamber, above all important ones, rarely turn up there, so to find a man of his stature in the office assigned to him as the leader of a party was all but astonishing. No secretary, no aides guarding the approaches, no noise and bustle of petitioners coming to and fro to indicate the presence of an important personage within. Just a little typed sign on the glass door, sellotaped over a more permanent, painted one announcing that this had once been an office belonging to the now-defunct Christian Democrats. It was so quiet that Flavia scarcely expected to find anyone in; she bothered to knock only because it seemed silly to go away without trying.

But di Lanna was not only there, he even opened the door himself, another all but unimaginable piece of behaviour. Important people in Italian politics – in any politics, come to think of it – do not open doors themselves; it indicates they are not, perhaps, that important after all. Di Lanna seemed prepared to take the risk of falling in people’s estimation as he waved her into the cramped little space without ceremony. Man-of-the-people act to show his left-wing credentials? Flavia thought. Or maybe a touch of American informality to indicate his orientation towards business and free market economics? She shook her head. She really must make an effort to keep it all simple.

‘You’re early,’ he said.

‘Am I?’ she replied, a little surprised.

‘Yes. You’re not due until four, I think. No matter. Let’s get on with it. Don’t expect me to say anything interesting, though.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she said before she could stop herself. To her surprise, di Lanna threw back his head and laughed. ‘Sit down, sit down. What’s your name, by the way?’

He sat himself and looked at her carefully, a slightly impish air of curiosity about him. Thinking about it later, Flavia decided it was his eyes that made up her mind; no one not fundamentally sound, she thought quite unreasonably, had eyes that twinkled in such a mischievous fashion. Di Lanna was one of those people she instantly liked. It took some time to figure out why he confused her, though. He dressed a little tweedily, an old establishment indicator, apeing a supposed English style evoking images of land and country values. But everything else suggested the new left – the haircut, the way of sitting, the hand movements. A deliberately confusing onslaught of associations, which had the effect of always slightly catching those he talked to unawares.

‘Who do you think I am?’

‘You’re yet another journalist, aren’t you? Come here to wonder when I’m going to stab the prime minister in the back?’

She handed over her identity card. Di Lanna did not look surprised. ‘Might I ask,’ she went on, ‘if your office is entirely safe for conversation?’

He paused for a second. ‘Every Wednesday morning, someone places a bug or two in here; every Wednesday afternoon I have it taken out again. They know this, but keep on doing it. It’s to serve notice I’m under surveillance, not because they expect to hear anything of interest. As it’s Thursday, we should be quite safe.’

‘And who are they?’

He shrugged. ‘Whoever. The dark hand of the state. You know. Perhaps you should tell me why the art theft police is here to see me?’

She hesitated only a second. ‘Because you may be related to an art thief. As you know quite well, as I assume it was you who provided three million dollars for a ransom payment last week.’

Di Lanna pouted in the sort of way which indicates that losing three million dollars is a matter of the utmost triviality. As, indeed, it probably was for him.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was told it would be handled discreetly. And that there would be no investigation. I must say, I am disappointed.’

‘You needn’t be. All I am doing is tying up a few loose ends. The whole business has become a little more complicated since your brother-in-law’s death.’

She noticed that mentioning Sabbatini produced not even a conventional look of dismay or regret on the politician’s face. If anything, there seemed to be a shadow of satisfaction on his closely-controlled features.

‘I would have thought it would have simplified things for you. That has been the effect on me.’

‘Quite the opposite, in my case,’ she replied. ‘It now seems that he was dead before the ransom was either asked for or collected. Which means that either he was working with someone else – who knows all about the whole embarrassing business and has the money – or someone was deliberately using his style of play-acting to confuse us.’

Di Lanna looked curious.

‘I am presumably not the only person to know about your relationship to him,’ she went on. ‘We must consider the possibility that this whole stunt was aimed at you, rather than anything else.’

He swung in his chair – another Americanism – then put his hands together, fingertips on his lips, priestly fashion. An old Christian Democrat habit. ‘Seems unlikely, surely? The only point to that would be if everyone knew about it. In that case – you’re right – it would be damaging.’

‘My point is that it still might be. The money is still out there, and someone knows the full story of the theft, the ransom, and – as he has the money – also has the convincing evidence to prove it. I suspect there is little we can do; whoever this character is, he can’t be touched without there being some risk of everybody discovering that the Italian state managed to lose a picture it promised to guard with its life. Nor that it, and you, connived in an illegal act to get it back again. Which, I assume, you do not wish to happen.’

‘Not really, no.’

‘So I shall be very careful. But I do think it is important to find out if possible who this other person is. Then there will be less chance of a nasty surprise one morning when you open the papers.’

Di Lanna considered, then nodded. ‘Perhaps wise. I always knew that little shit would cause more trouble sooner or later.’

‘Might I ask what contact you had with him?’

‘None whatsoever. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in any way for nearly twenty years. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist. He betrayed everyone he ever came into contact with.’

‘But you still gave him money.’

Di Lanna looked inquiringly.

‘I talked to the lawyer who paid him a monthly allowance.’

‘That was money from his father, held in trust. Had I been able to stop it entirely, I would have done so. I spent a fortune on legal bills to try and get him excluded, and largely succeeded. But I couldn’t manage it all. What he was left with was enough to make me wonder why he did this when I heard about it. His one good quality – his only one, perhaps – was that he genuinely did not care a hoot about money. If he had it, he spent it. If he didn’t he didn’t care.’

‘He seems to have changed his ways, then.’

Di Lanna shrugged.

‘Can you tell me anything about him? Friends, associates, that sort of thing?’

Di Lanna shook his head. ‘I think the voluminous police files would be more use. As I say, I refused even to talk to him.’

‘Was he that bad?’

‘Yes. The damage he did was incalculable and unforgivable.’

‘He didn’t do much, though. Apart from rob a bank.’

‘You are very forgiving for a member of the police, signora. However, I was not thinking of his politics, or his self-indulgent antics. I was referring to his murder of my wife. His sister.’

Flavia paused to take stock. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a while. ‘I’m not with you.’

‘Maurizio fooled around with these people, and being him couldn’t help bragging about his family connections – he was happy to play revolutionary, but never wanted it forgotten that he came from a rich and powerful family. Maybe it was his way of rebelling against his father, who was a formidable man. Very powerful, determined, and insistent on getting his own way. He doted on his daughter, and had no time for his son. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

‘These people had no more loyalty to Maurizio than he had to them. For them he was a joker, a source of money, no more. And when they wanted to pull off a really big coup, they exploited him mercilessly. He told them all about his family and their houses. He told them all about his sister, what shops she liked, what restaurants she frequented. My wife, signora. I loved her more than anyone I have ever loved, before or since. We’d been married for eighteen months, that’s all.

‘The rest is simple, if painful. They took her, then made their demands. I got the money ready – I would have paid twice as much – but the police were unusually effective for once and found the house where they thought she was being held. There was a siege, which ended in shooting.

‘It went terribly wrong. There were terrorists inside and they were all killed. But Maria was not there. And the response was immediate and savage. She was found the next day, dumped behind a bush in the Janiculum. She was twenty-four. They had shot her in the head. It killed her father, and nearly sent me mad with grief.’

Flavia sat back in her chair and thought. She had no memory of the tragedy.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was one of the many things that were hushed up, as much as possible. It would have been an enormous propaganda coup for them and we felt that at the least we could deny them that. Her body was collected before the press could get there, and we put out the story that she had died in a car crash. It pained me not to have my loss known so people would understand, but it was the right thing to do. I thought so then, and I still do.’

He shrugged helplessly. The look of pain on his face was all too real and immediate. ‘I’ve never really got over it, I think. And I have certainly never forgiven him. So don’t ask me about him now.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…’

‘How could you?’ He paused, and thought, swinging in his chair once more, but gently and without affectation this time. ‘Antonio Sabauda was interior minister at the time; he broke the news to me himself. Stayed with me, comforted me.’

Di Lanna smiled, very slightly. ‘I am always asked when I am going to bring him down, pull out of the coalition and try to increase my own power at his expense. The answer which I can never give is that I am not. I owe him gratitude for the way he helped me through those dark times. I can never say that, of course; my credibility as a politician, such as it is, would be destroyed if it became known that I was acting out of motives like loyalty and gratitude. So I have to talk about unity and stability instead. Which, of course, are taken to be code words for biding my time until I trip him up.’

Flavia shook her head once more and felt a wave of nostalgia for nice simple criminals. You always – generally, at least – knew where you were with them.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘I think. What do you think Sabbatini was up to, then?’

‘I have no idea, and I don’t care. Thanks to you the picture is recovered, and happily he is dead. May he rot. Three million dollars is a small price to pay for that.’

He reached over his desk and picked up a picture frame which he handed to her. It was of a young woman, holding a bunch of white flowers, smiling at the camera. It had the look of distant history on it already.

‘She was pretty,’ Flavia said, not knowing what else she could say.

‘She was delightful. Everything I ever wanted. We never had any children, alas. That would have been some compensation, at least. He denied me even that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Di Lanna made an effort to bring himself back to the present.

‘Why did you provide the money for the ransom?’

‘Because the prime minister knew the moment he heard of the theft who had committed it, and when he told me I offered to help. One must take responsibility for members of one’s family, however despicable they may be. Sabauda was very worried about using public funds; the chances of someone noticing would have been large. I assisted. That is all. As I say, for me it was a small thing financially. The emotional cost, you might say, was much higher.’

Di Lanna looked at his watch. ‘Now, I’m afraid you must excuse me, signora …’ he said gently.

Flavia got to her feet. ‘Of course. I apologize. I have taken up far too much of your time already.’

‘What will you do now?’

‘I will tiptoe delicately around the matter, and see if there is anything to be done to tidy things up.’

‘May I give you a word of advice? Leave it be. There is nothing to be gained from it. My wife was buried without explanation. Let Maurizio go the same way. He deserves no better.

‘And,’ he added, showing for the first time the slightest flash of claw – not much, nothing overt, but none the less there and all the more impressive for it – ‘it will win you no thanks from anyone.’