The Vatican Rip [antikvár]

THE VATICAN RIP Here are some further adventures of Lovejoy, the antique dealer extraordinary. This time he is asked by Signor Arcellano to retrieve the Signor's antique which is in the Pope's possession in the very heart of the Vatican. Lovejoy not only knows how to spot antiques, he also knows how to make them. But when the Eternal City threatens to become his eternal resting-place, he manifests other abilities, and the Colosseum witnesses its strangest ever gladiatorial combat. 1 The trouble with life is, you start off worse and go downhill. I'd bought the rip in winter, two days before my Italian lessons with the delectable Maria were to begin—though I didn't know that then. I'm an antique dealer. The antiques game is always at a lowish ebb in January, probably because everybody's spent up after Christmas and is knackered by the weather anyway, so I was on the scrounge and feeling very sorry for myself It hadn't been too easy of late, what with inflation and all that. And the scanty tourists who knock about East Anglia in deep midwinter tend to be holy, on their way to carol services in our ancient little chapels. They aren't so keen on our priceless (or indeed worthless) antiques. On this particular day the roads out of my village were bad. There had been one of those heavy snowfalls the previous night after a solid weekend of sustained gales. Typically, the buses never even started out from the nearby town, and as far as civilization was 1