Giotto's Hand

“That’s the one. He nicked a Fra Angelico from Padua. Got caught, of course. According to my calculations, he would have been three and a half when he committed the Straga raid, and is far too stupid ever to get away with anything for long. This is why I put the whole lot in the extinct box. It was the best proof imaginable that I was wrong. So Giotto has been gathering dust for a couple of years and, in my opinion, should return there…”

“Good morning. General.”

The door opened and the voice entered before the small and compact body from which it emerged. A moment later, a man who looked surprisingly like a well-fed Siamese cat entered the room, with a look of superior amusement on his face. Bottando smiled back genially, with an expression that connoisseurs like Flavia knew to be entirely false.

“Good morning, dottore.” he said. “How nice to see you.”

Dottore Corrado Argan was one of those people that large-scale organizations periodically create for the sole purpose of making the lives of its several members virtually intolerable. He had started off as an art historian—thus giving himself somewhat dubious intellectual credentials which he played on mercilessly—then, finding the Italian and international university system far too sensible to give him a post, had gravitated into the bureaucracy, specifically the beni artistici, the amorphous body which keeps its eye on the national heritage.

After successfully creating chaos in several areas of that fine organization’s activities, he had become suffused with indignation over the way bits of the national heritage kept on going missing, and decided that what the fight against crime really needed to make it effective was the stimulus of his own powerful intellect to focus its activities.

He was not the first to imagine he might make a difference and, to give him very grudging credit, he was certainly enthusiastic. That, of course, mainly had the effect of making him more tiresome. Bottando was well-practised in dealing with periodic memoranda from outsiders demanding action, suggesting campaigns and recommending policies. Long experience had taught him the best way of agreeing profoundly with all interventions, thanking their authors and then ignoring them totally.

What he was not capable of dealing with too well was the outsider moving in, taking over office space and settling down for an extended stay to write reports based on a day-to-day monitoring of activities. Which was what the loathsome Argan had done. For six months now he had read his way through files, sat in on meetings, pipe in mouth, supercilious smile on face, making notes that no one was allowed to see and muttering things about how the department did not conceptualize its policies in a sufficiently holistic fashion.

Bottando, for once, had been rather slow off the mark in meeting the threat, and was now paying the price. Because Argan was so ludicrous, he had not taken the man seriously. Only when his secretary had undertaken a do-it-yourself espionage operation late one evening, and handed over photocopies of the innumerable reports and memoranda the man had been sending off to those in high places, did the magnitude of the problem become clear.

In brief, Argan wanted Bottando’s job, and was trying very hard to get it. His line was that, in these days of international crime, old-fashioned policing (for which read old-fashioned policemen, as personified by General Taddeo Bottando) was no longer sufficient. What was needed was an efficient organization (i.e. a cheaper one) headed up by an executive skilled in man-management and resource allocation (i.e. himself). No mention in any of this of catching criminals or recovering lost works of art.

War had broken out, in a quiet and civilized fashion. Bottando found that his tardiness had blocked off the obvious response: it was too late now to chuck the man out for fear of being accused of wanting to hide something. As much as possible, he fed him false information, so that he could be made to look a fool. Unfortunately, Argan, as an art historian, didn’t think facts were so important anyway and carried on regardless.

On his side, Bottando had the policing establishment, who quite rightly saw enthusiastic amateurs as a threat to them all. On the other. Argan had the bureaucracy, which believed firmly that the quality of an organization depended solely on how many jobs it provided for administrators. And they, as Bottando was aware, were the ones with the check books.