They had two radios, one with a spent battery.

They were awaiting a call to tell them that the famous Caravaggio painting of St Jerome, stolen in 1984 from the St John’s Co-Cathedral Museum, had been retrieved.

The two men smoking and drinking whisky were Fr Mario Zerafa, then Curator of the National Museum and former police officer Alfred Calleja.

They were keeping contact with another Calleja, the Brigadier of the Armed Forces, who was in a helicopter circling the skies of Malta, and with a number of police cars.

For a number of years, Fr Zerafa had been receiving phone calls from a man who said he had stolen the Caravaggio. The net was being drawn and the police were poised to pounce. But the way Fr Zerafa tells it in his newly-published diary details makes it all sound like a comic turn.

While they were waiting, the Caravaggio thief, who quite unoriginally used the pseudonym Merisi to identify himself (Caravaggio’s real surname) called. Fr Zerafa, who had led him on promising him a Lm35,000 ‘reward’, told him he had

the ‘lawyer’ with him to confirm they had the money.

The ‘lawyer’ was Mr Calleja himself. ‘Merisi’ promised to cut another piece of canvas from the priceless painting and to leave it addressed to Fr Zerafa in his priory’s letterbox in Sliema. It never got there.

Fr Zerafa had another brainwave: he asked Mr Calleja if the police sniffer dogs could pick up the trail from the piece of canvas. Mr Calleja checked with the Police HQ and was told the sniffer dogs were trained to identify drugs only.

An increasingly agitated Fr Zerafa then asked Mr Calleja if the men knew what they were looking for. The Commissioner replied that the police authorities had kept the real objective of the raid till the very end. This meant that most of the police going round in the cars had no idea what they were looking for. So Fr Zerafa sent someone out to buy 10 postcards of the paintings from the museum book shop.

At one point, as Fr Zerafa tells it, the helicopter pilot informed them that someone was coming out of the factory, which previous investigations had indicated as the probable site of the stolen painting.

“The Mr Calleja in my room gave orders to the Mr Calleja in the helicopter to arrest them. I stopped him and said: “No! Not until we know where the painting is.” Calleja ordered: “Cancel previous order!” The answer came back “What previous order?”

At that, Mr Calleja, to Fr Zerafa’s great surprise, rushed out of the office without a word.

A disconsolate Fr Zerafa went back to his priory, feeling totally bewildered and very worried. The prior told him no letter had arrived for him.

At about 3pm a loud knocking on the priory door woke up most of the priests who were taking their siesta. The man who was banging on the door, a plainclothes policeman, started hollering: “We’ve caught them!” What about the painting, Fr Zerafa asked him. But the man just repeated “We’ve caught them.”

It was only when he arrived at Police HQ that Fr Zerafa could see the painting had been recovered. The ministers (Guido de Marco then Minister for the Police, and Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Minister of Culture) were there along with all police officials. The Prime Minister (Eddie Fenech Adami) came and hugged Fr Zerafa. He now says: “The police were very generous with their whiskies!”

The painting was stolen on Saturday, 29 December 1984. A tourist was going round the almost-deserted St John’s Museum when he found a chain barring his entry to where the St Jerome was on display. The chain had a notice fixed to it “Work in Progress”. The tourist who had come to the museum to see the Caravaggio went to the curator’s office to complain. The curator, Dominic Cutajar, knew very well there was no work going on at that time. And sure enough, the painting had been stolen by thieves posing as workmen.

Fr Zerafa’s memories of those long-ago years are riddled with other comic anecdotes.

On the night of the the theft, he and Mr Cutajar went to Police HQ to report the theft and then went to inform the minister. Fr Zerafa thoughtfully never tells the readers the name of the minister, although most of the references he makes to him are uncomplimentary. But the Minister for Culture then doubled as the Minister for Foreign Affairs and was Dr Alex Sceberras Trigona.

On that night the minister was not in. Fr Zerafa and Mr Cutajar remained huddled outside his house waiting for him to turn up, shivering in the cold. When he turned up, around midnight, they informed him and he promised to call Fr Zerafa the next day at noon. He never did.

There then followed what usually happens when something goes wrong: fingers pointing in all directions. A Monsignor tells him, in front of the Archbishop: “These things did not happen when I was in charge.” As Fr Zerafa says, “At times it was easier to deal with the Mafia than with ministers and monsignors.”

But the ultimate in bumbledom comes when the thief (Merisi) started contacting Fr Zerafa and the decision was taken to tap his phone to hopefully lead them to the painting. The Minister for Arts got his colleague, the Minister for Communications with him and a technician to fix the phone. They tell Fr Zerafa, over his objections, that telephone “surveillance” was “legal” and had been done in the past, “in the recent past”. This was in December 1986.

But the funny thing is that the phone tapping did not work for a long time. Technicians came and changed the priest’s phone a number of times and did things with it, but it still didn’t work for a long time.