A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  "You could always take it in to have it X-rayed," I volunteered. "We don't do that at the museum, but if you talk to Eleanor Freeman in the radiography department at UW, she'd be able to do it for you."

  "Yeah," Blusher said. "Sure. Maybe I'll do that." He smiled good-naturedly, quite mellow now, shook hands with us, and started walking us back across the room. "Well, thanks for coming, big guys. Sorry I dragged you down here for nothing."

  He laid his heavy arm around Calvin's slim shoulders. "What I said about that check still goes, buddy. It's not your

  fault."

  "Thanks a lot, Mike. We really appreciate that. Hey, can I ask you something?"

  "Shoot."

  "If your goods come from Bologna, how come your firm is called Venezia?"

  "It's all a matter of marketing," Blusher said with a grin. "If you were selling quality art products would you name your outfit Bologna?"

  We all laughed.

  "Hey," said Calvin, "we forgot about the other painting, the Rubens."

  Blusher clapped his hand to his forehead. "You're right. What do you say, Norgren, you want to take a look as long as you're here?"

  "Sure." If the "Rubens" was as well-done as the "van Eyck," I wanted to see it. And after that authentic old panel, I was curious about what this one was painted on.

  We went back to the cabinet. Blusher slid in the drawer with the "van Eyck" and pulled out the one below it. In it was a slightly larger painting, not on wood but canvas, in an ornate, gilded Renaissance frame.

  I leaned over to take a closer look at the painting itself. I looked hard, just to be sure, but it took me less time to reach a conclusion on this one than on the other. No more than five seconds.

  I looked up from it, first at Calvin, then at Blusher.

  "It's real," I said. "It's a Rubens."

  Not only that, but I knew just which Rubens it was; a loving, exuberant portrait of his second wife, Hélène Fourment, painted in 1630. The pink and pretty Hélène had been sixteen when she'd married the gout-ridden but hearty fifty-three-year-old artist, and some of his most joyous and personal works—no question of student participation here—were portraits of her. This was one of the most charming—all flirty eyes, rosy flesh, and scaffolded bosom.

  More important, it was without a doubt the Rubens that had been stolen from Clara Gozzi's neo-Gothic Ferrara townhouse twenty-two months earlier.

  Chapter 3

  So that was how I'd gotten myself involved in the Bologna thefts, at least from Tony Whitehead's perspective, and I suppose he had a point. I thought about it while he went back to Steamer's counter to get us some more wine, and when he came back I had an answer for him.

  "I'll make a deal with you."

  He brightened. This was the kind of talk he understood.

  "I'll brave the Mafia and act as a conduit to the carabinieri, or whatever I'm supposed to do," I said, "if you put that sixty thousand dollars back in the Renaissance and Baroque budget to buy that Boursse."

  "No way, Chris. Can't be done. It's too late to reallocate the budget. Absolutely impossible. I couldn't shake loose a dime."

  I was familiar with Tony's style. I waited.

  "Maybe twenty thousand," he allowed after a few seconds.

  I waited. I sipped my wine and watched the sea gulls. What we were negotiating for was enough money to buy a small domestic painting by Esaias Boursse, a nearly unknown seventeenth-century Dutch painter. Most of his work deserves its obscurity, but occasionally he created paintings of stunning beauty. Some of them were believed for decades to be by Vermeer, which gives you some idea.

  The one I had in mind was owned by Ugo Scoccimarro, who was on my list of people to see in Italy, inasmuch as he was lending us four paintings for the exhibition. I had seen the Boursse several years before—an interior domestic scene, exquisitely done—and asked Scoccimarro if he would consider selling it. To my surprise he had said yes, as long as it was to a museum. The price was a nominal $60,000.

  This year I had finally gotten Tony to include it in our acquisitions budget, only to have the money snatched away for something else a few weeks later. It was a common enough occurrence; I had merely sighed and put it out of my thoughts. But I was reminded of it when I went to Michael Blusher's warehouse. The panel on which the fake van Eyck had been painted was much like the panel on Scoccimarro's Boursse, which I had previously examined and researched thoroughly. (That was how I happened to know all about the marks made by seventeenth-century water-driven frame saws, etc., not that I'd tell Blusher. Or Calvin, for that matter.)

  So the Boursse was on my mind again, and it had belatedly occurred to me that there might be a way to get it after all.

  "All right," Tony said, "all right. Maybe I could get you thirty."

  "Thirty's no help. It has to be sixty. "

  Tony examined me over the rim of his wine glass, his eyes narrowed against the sun. "You used to be such a nice kid," he mused. "When did you get to be such a wheeler- dealer?"

  I grinned. "Been taking lessons from the best of them, boss."

  He smiled back. "Okay," he said. "It's a deal."

  "Un cappuccino doppio, per piacere," I called to the white-jacketed barman who stood leaning against the wall and looking, if possible, sleepier than I was.

  "Va bene, signore, subito."

  Like a mechanical toy that had just had a coin inserted into it, he jerked to life at his espresso machine, an imposing rococo apparatus of chrome tubes, levers, and spouts that sat in gleaming splendor on the marble countertop. He placed a cup the size of a bucket under a spout and slowly, with fierce, firm-jawed concentration, pulled down one of the long levers. With a faint, drawn-out hiss of steam the velvety aroma of good coffee suffused the cafe, and the big cup was half- filled with espresso as black as ink. A generous dollop of milk was tossed, not poured, into a metal pitcher and held up to another spout, thin and snaky, and still another lever was depressed. There was another hiss while the pitcher was rotated and jiggled, and in a few seconds the milk was a steaming froth. The barman topped off the cup with it, then lifted a shaker of shaved chocolate and glanced keenly at me for further instructions. At my nod the chocolate was sprinkled over the milk with a showman's flourish and the completed production was borne to the table.

  "Grazie, " I said.

  "Prego, signore."

  He went back to station himself behind the bar and, with a sigh, leaned against the wall once more, exhausted by his efforts. The internal mechanism switched off to await the next customer. All was still.

  Ah, Italia. It was nice to be back. Not that there was any shortage of espresso bars in Seattle these days, but for the real drama, the true spectacle, of cappuccino-making, you had to come to the mother country.

  It was Monday, a little after 4:00 P. M . Italian time; seven in the morning by my biological clock, and I hadn't slept the night before, what with long, gritty layovers in Chicago and Rome. (Is it my imagination, or was there a time in the remote past, a time without "hubs," when you could actually fly directly from one place to another?) There was going to be a "small, informal" reception and dinner for me in three hours, and I was trying to perk up my sluggish nervous system with a fix of caffeine. I was also concentrating on an article in the International Herald Tribune, which I'd picked up at the airport and skimmed during the taxi ride to Bologna.

  The piece began on an inside column on page four, and I'd overlooked it in the taxi, but it had my total attention now.

  STOLEN RUBENS ON WAY BACK TO ITALY

  Seattle—Peter Paul Rubens' Portrait of Hélène Fourment, conservatively valued at $1,500,000, will soon be back in the hands of its Italian owner, Clara Cozzi, almost two years after its disappearance from a Bologna restorer's workshop.

  The theft of the Rubens, one of a trio of art burglaries in and around Bologna in the early morning hours of June 22, 1987, resulted in the murder of Ruggero Giampietro, 71, a night guard at the workshop. Along with five other paintings sto
len from Mrs. Gozzi's palatial Ferrara home and some eighteen from Bologna's Pinacoteca Nazionale, the picture had been the object of a frustrating international search effort.

  The seventeenth-century masterpiece was discovered unharmed by Michael Blusher, 46, a Seattle importer of objets d'art.

  I paused. Just how reliable was this article? Could a reporter who referred to the stuff that Blusher imported as "objets d'art" be trusted? I took my first long, grateful swallow of coffee and continued reading.

  Mr. Blusher, president of Venezia Trading Company, found the painting last week in a large shipment from Bologna. Attempts to determine how it got into the shipment have met with defeat.

  "I knew right away I had something special," Mr. Blusher said. "The first thing I did was get a guard, which I paid for out of my own pocket. Then I yelled for help."

  The help arrived in the form of Christopher Norgren, 34, Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Mr. Norgren immediately identified the two-by-three-foot picture as the stolen Rubens, a determination subsequently verified by other art authorities. American and Italian customs agencies have worked together to minimize bureaucratic delay, and Mrs. Gozzi's agents have already arrived in Seattle for the purpose of bringing the painting back. Mr. Blusher will receive a substantial reward, according to a spokesman from Assicurazioni Generali of Milan, which insures Mrs. Gozzi's collection.

  A second object unexplainably included in the shipment was a panel bearing the purported signature of the fifteenth-century Dutch artist Jan van Eyck. This was denounced by Mr. Norgren as a forgery, although he identified the wood on which it was painted as an authentic Dutch art panel several hundred years old.

  None of the twenty-four other paintings from the three thefts has been reliably located, although rumors abound. The total value of the missing objects is in the vicinity of $100,000,000.

  Thoughtfully I put down the paper. I am not by nature distrustful of others. I may not be as gullible as I used to be (a good no-holds-barred divorce has a way of curing that), but I'm far from a suspicious person. All the same, I began to wonder, in an unfocused way, about Blusher. During the time that Calvin and I had been in his warehouse, I had had the uncomfortable feeling that we were being used, that he wasn't being quite honest with us. Was it the reward he'd been after, and not the publicity? We were by no means dealing with peanuts: The standard insurance reward in art- theft cases was ten percent of the value of the object. So if the Rubens was really valued at $1,500,000, which did indeed seem conservative, Blusher would come away from this richer by $150,000.

  I swallowed the last of the cappuccino and sat a while longer, pondering. Then I went to my room in the Hotel Europa to shower, and to try to nap for an hour before the reception.

  But sleep wouldn't come. I couldn't stop thinking about Blusher's $150,000 reward. I tossed irritably on the bed. Well, what about it? He deserved it, didn't he? Who knew where the Rubens would be by now if not for him? He'd found it, he'd had the perception to recognize it as something important, and he'd immediately contacted the museum. If Gozzi's insurance company wanted to give him a fraction of the money he'd saved them, what was wrong with that? Nothing at all. It happened all the time.

  Just what did I think I suspected him of anyway?

  Bologna la Grassa—Bologna the Fat—they called it in the fourteenth century, and Bologna la Grassa they call it still. The words refer to the richness of the fare, but they might just as well apply to the richness of life in general, or to the people, who are so much more robust and hearty than their dark, lean cousins in the south that they seem to be from a different country. (Talk to the Bolognese and you get the impression that they are. Africa begins just below Rome, the northerners like to say.)

  In the surrounding countryside are some of the aristocrats of Italian capitalism: Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini. Riunite, too. And in Bologna itself the boutiques tucked away among the arcaded, medieval streets display fashions that rival Rome's, and the cuisine in the grand old restaurants is the finest (and among the most expensive) in Italy, which is saying something. What makes it all so peculiar is that Bologna is Italy's center of leftist politics, and has been for forty-five years. It is a rare tourist here who realizes that he is doing his shopping and gourmandizing in the largest Communist-run city in the Western world.

  Certainly you could never tell from looking at the decor, the menu prices or the flashy crowds in the Ristorante Notai, currently the foremost restaurant in Bologna and therefore, arguably, in Italy. It was here, in a private room, that the "small, informal" reception and dinner in my honor was held, courtesy of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna's most prestigious art museum, and co-sponsor of Northerners in Italy.

  My experience with receptions in my honor is pretty limited, but I have to admit I don't seem to have any moral or constitutional aversion to them; as a matter of fact, I haven't been to a bum one yet. This one was no exception, although I found myself wishing I'd had a chance to catch up on my sleep first, and maybe my Italian too; I was having a hard time following the volatile conversation (a couple of Camparis to start with hadn't helped any). In any case, I was relieved when dinnertime came and I was seated at a small table with three old acquaintances who took pity on me and spoke English.

  The topic of discussion was the one everybody had been talking about all evening: the finding of Clara Gozzi's Rubens. Of course, I had telephoned her the previous week, as soon as I'd left Blusher, but to my surprise the news hadn't gotten around to anyone else here until its appearance in today's papers, perhaps because Clara was something of a recluse. She lived in Ferrara, some thirty miles away, and didn't often mingle in the Bolognese mainstream.

  "What do you think, Christopher? You've met this Blusher." Amedeo Di Vecchio, Cinquecento scholar and eminent director of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, looked up from his tortellini di erbetta and squinted penetratingly at me through rectangular, gold-rimmed glasses that sat crookedly on a long, pinched nose. "Is he involved in some way? Is he a crook?"

  "I don't know, Amedeo," I said as if the question hadn't been nibbling at my mind too. "I only met him once. I wouldn't say I'd trust him with my life, but as to his having any part in the thefts . . ."

  Max Cabot's rolling chuckle drowned me out. "Mike Blusher? Impossible. Don't give it another thought. I've met the man too. Sold him a few things, as a matter of fact."

  That surprised me. He and Blusher were unlikely business associates. Max was an expatriate American who had lived in Bologna for over a decade, and had made a niche for himself as a respected art dealer and restorer. He was good too, a former conservator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His work was sought-after and correspondingly expensive. So were the pictures he sold.

  "I would have thought your stuff wasn't quite his style," I said.

  "This was two or three years ago, Chris. Blusher was just starting out in the art world. No shortage of money, though. He bought a few lots of eighteenth-century Venetian pictures at one of my auctions. Second-rate vedutisti, mostly, but expensive. I got the distinct impression he didn't have any idea what he was doing." He laughed. "I understand he's into a somewhat different level of quality now."

  I thought about the two dozen or so identical "Rembrandts" in the warehouse in Seattle, each one lathered with a quarter-inch of gluey, enamel colored, guaranteed-tocrackle-within-two-days varnish. "You could say that," I said.

  "Two or three years ago?" Di Vecchio said sharply. "He was here when the Rubens was stolen?" His sinewy neck tilted eagerly forward. This was not mere curiosity on his part. The Pinacoteca had lost eighteen of its most precious paintings that night.

  Max frowned. "Well, let's see. . . . The Venetian paintings were knocked down, oh, some time in April 1987. Or maybe May? The thefts weren't until June twenty-second and as far as I know he was long gone."

  Max's certainty about the latter date was understandable. It had been from his workshop, where it had been undergoing restoration,
that Clara Gozzi's Rubens had been stolen.

  "But he could have been here," Di Vecchio persisted.

  "No, you can forget it, believe me. Whoever took those paintings knew what they were doing. They were selective. Only the best. They didn't take any junk, either from me or Gozzi or the Pinacoteca. Nothing but the best."

  "The Pinacoteca Nazionale," Di Vecchio said severely, "does not have 'junk.' "

  Max laughed appreciatively. "Well, I do, or did at the time. I had four eighteenth-century canvases of very dubious provenance in the basement for cleaning. You know, 'School of Somebody' kinds of things. They were sitting about five feet from the Rubens, and to an uninformed eye they would have looked every bit as good. But only the one painting was taken. That kind of discrimination would have been beyond Blusher, I'm afraid."

  Di Vecchio made a tight, irritated little movement with his mouth. "I'm not suggesting he carried it out personally, my dear Massimiliano. But he might have had something to do with it."

  Max shrugged amicably. "Could be, Amedeo." Behind his soup-strainer of a mustache he chewed contentedly on a mouthful of torteilini.

  Amedeo Di Vecchio and Max Cabot made an interesting study in contrasts. If someone asked you to guess by looking at them which was a son of Emilia-Romagna and which of Durham, New Hampshire, you'd answer without hesitation, but you'd be wrong. Di Vecchio was a bony six-two, a pallid, Yankeeish-looking man with a short, carroty Abraham Lincoln beard beginning to show some grizzling at its none-too-carefully groomed edges. Max was three or four inches shorter and thirty pounds heavier, graying and running comfortably to fat these days, with a smooth, padded complexion that made him look as if he'd been reared on tagliatelle and olive oil.

  They were opposites in temperament, too. Max was easygoing and easy to be around, radiating satisfaction with his life. Di Vecchio was dour, itchy, critical, with a febrile glitter to his eyes like an Old Testament prophet's, at least if you can believe Bellini or El Greco.