The Last Judgement

‘Please, Flavia. We have to use it.’

‘But it’s useless.’

‘I know it’s useless. That’s not the point. This is an international venture which cost a fortune. If we don’t use it periodically we’ll be asked why not. Good heavens, woman, last time I went into the room the monitor was being used as a plant-stand. How would that look if anyone from the budget committee came around?’

‘No.’

Bottando sighed. Somehow or other he seemed to have trouble projecting his authority, despite holding the rank of general. Think of Napoleon, for example. If he issued an order, did his subordinates snort derisively and refuse to pay a blind bit of attention? If Caesar ordered an immediate flanking movement, did his lieutenants look up from their newspapers and say they were a bit tired at the moment, how about next Wednesday? They did not. Of course, the fact that Flavia was perfectly correct weakened his case a little. But that was not the point. It was time to exert control. Discipline.

‘Please?’ he said appealingly.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said eventually. ‘I’ll switch it on. Tell you what, I’ll leave it on all night. How about that?’

‘Splendid, my dear. I’m so grateful.’

5

While the authorities in the Art Theft Department were dealing with crucial matters of international co-operation, Jonathan Argyll spent the morning coping with more basic matters of stock management. That is, he was doing a little work on his picture. He had been struck by a good idea. That is, Muller had said the picture was one of a series. Who more likely to want to buy it than the person, or museum, or institution, who owned the others? Assuming, that is, they were all together. All he had to do was find out where the rest were, and offer to complete the set. It might not work, of course, but it was worth an hour or so of his time.

Besides, this was the bit of his trade that he liked. Dealing with recalcitrant clients, and bargaining and extracting money and working out whether things could be sold at a profit were the bread and butter of his life, but he didn’t really enjoy them much. Too much reality for him to cope with comfortably. A meditative hour in a library was far more to his taste.

The question was where to start. Muller said he’d read about it, but where? He was half minded to ring the man up, but reckoned he’d have gone to work, and he didn’t know where that was. Anyway, a skilled researcher like himself could probably find out fairly quickly anyway.

All he knew about the picture was that it was by a man called Floret; and he knew that because it was signed, indistinctly but legibly, in the bottom left-hand corner. He could guess it was done in the 1780s, and it was obviously French.

So he proceeded methodically and with order, a bit like Fabriano only more quietly. Starting at the beginning with the great bible of all art historians, Thieme und Becker. All twenty-five volumes in German, unfortunately, but he could make out enough to be directed to the next stage.

Floret, Jean. Künstler, gest. 1792. That was the stuff. A list of paintings, all in museums. Six lines in all, pretty much the basic minimum. Not a painter to be taken seriously. But the reference did direct him to an article published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1937 which was his next port of call. This was by a man called Jules Hartung, little more than a biographical sketch, really, but it fleshed out the details. Born 1765, worked in France, guillotined for not being quite revolutionary enough in 1792. Served him right, as well, according to the text. Floret had worked for a patron, the Comte de Mirepoix, producing a series of subjects on legal themes. Then, come the Revolution, he had denounced his benefactor and supervised the confiscation of the man’s goods and the ruin of his family. A common enough sort of story, perhaps.

But 1937 was a long time ago, and in any case the article didn’t say where any of his pictures were, apart from hinting strongly that, fairly obviously, they no longer belonged to the Mirepoix family. For their current whereabouts he had to work a lot harder. For the rest of the morning and well into his normal lunch-hour, he trawled through histories of French art, histories of neoclassicism, guides to museums and check-lists of locations in the hunt for the slightest hint that would point him in the right direction.