A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  On the other hand, some lenders have little to tell you. From what I knew of Clara, I expected her to be one of these. Crusty, yes, but she wasn't a stickler. Or so I hoped.

  My pressing of the buzzer wasA GLAINUIPIG- LIU111 Yid

  answered by a tall, annoyed- looking woman in a severely tailored suit. She peered distractedly and with impatience at me, as if I'd interrupted some terribly pressing task. This was the third time in a year I had come to see Clara, and the same woman had responded each time in the same way. By now I was beginning to understand that this was her normal manner. It was, I supposed, what came of working too long for Clara.

  "I'm Christopher Norgren," I said in Italian. "I have an appointment with signora Gozzi."

  "You're too early," she told me brusquely, remaining in character. "Your appointment is in fifteen minutes. You'll have to wait."

  Clara's querulous voice rang out. "Who is that? Christopher? You're early, damn it. Come in, come in!"

  Under the stern eye of the maid, or secretary, or whatever she was, I headed for the doorway from which the gruff voice had come, walking down a long, unfurnished hallway hung like a museum gallery with rows of contemporary paintings on both walls: Kiefer, Dine, Diebenkorn, others I didn't know. I didn't like any of them. Clara's tastes were quite eclectic, more so than mine, and her collection was arranged chronologically, with the most recent on the ground floor, the earliest (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) at the top. The higher I climbed, the happier I usually was.

  I entered an unfinished room that had probably once been the dining room, and was treated to a restrained version of the full Mediterranean greeting: bear hug, back-pats, even a kiss on, or at least in the vicinity of, each cheek. This was uncharacteristically exuberant for Clara. I understood that I was being thanked for my part in recovering the Rubens.

  "This is Christopher Norgren," she announced in Italian to a shiny-faced man with pale, plastered-down hair and a dandy's pencil-line mustache. "A scholar of note in his field, but lamentably narrow."

  Had Clara delivered her many such remarks with a smile or even the mordant lifting of an eyebrow—anything to suggest irony—she would have been regarded as a witty woman. But she never did. Her pouchy, homely face rarely changed its indifferent expression.

  "Sono molto lieto—" the man began, but Clara interrupted him.

  "His Italian stinks. If you hope to be understood, Filippo, use English."

  "Okay, sure, but, you know, my English stinks." He said this in English with a grin, a small man of fifty in a polka- dot bow tie and a checked, wasp-waisted sport coat. His accent reminded me of Ugo's speech, so I assumed he was Sicilian, too. He held out a manicured hand with bulky rings on two fingers. "I am Filippo Croce. And you are Christopher Norgren?"

  I was used to the mild wonder with which this was asked. The trouble is, you see, I don't look like any kind of a museum curator, let alone a curator of Renaissance and Baroque art. At thirty-four, I'm a little young for the job, but more than that I don't look scholarly or even particularly intelligent; I don't look patrician; I don't look ... well, consequential. I'm of average build, average height, with an average brown mustache, and I look, so I've been told, like your average, easygoing, nice guy who works in computer store or maybe for the government. I mean, I look like a curator to me, but enough people have told me I don't so that I'm used to it by now.

  "You two don't know each other?" Clara said, surprised. Her English was excellent, the slight accent not so much Italian as a sort of generic Continental, the result of having homes in four countries. "But no, of course you wouldn't. Filippo's been in Ferrara less than a year, haven't you, Filippo?"

  "Five months," he said to me. "I was in the south before. I am a dealer in art." With a small flourish he produced an embossed card:

  F. Croce

  Galleria d'Arte Moderna

  Corso della Giovecca, 16

  Ferrara

  "Christopher is the man who rescued Max Cabot the other night," Clara told him.

  "I'm afraid I didn't do too good a job," I said.

  Croce clucked sympathetically.

  "It was Max's own fault, of course," Clara said crossly. "If he hadn't gone around shouting about going to the police, it wouldn't have happened at all. Stupid man." She hadn't been at the dinner the other night, but of course the story wouldn't have taken long to get to Ferrara.

  "They smashed both his legs, you know," I said. "He won't ever walk normally again."

  I suppose that what I had in mind was to stir up a little sympathy for poor Max, but it was wasted on Clara. "The man doesn't understand the meaning of discretion, of simple prudence, " she said, going along with Di Vecchio and Luca. "Careless, thoughtless. He runs off at the mouth." This was accompanied by an illustrative twirling of fingers at her own mouth. "What about the other one, Scoccimarro? Wasn't he with you, too? Was he hurt?"

  "No, we were on our way back from seeing him off at the station when it happened."

  "Ugo's a good sort. If you ask him something he gives you the answer. You can tell him I said so."

  "I will. I'm flying to Sicily on Saturday."

  "You can also tell him he likes his grappa too much."

  There was an awkward silence broken by Croce's clearing of his throat. "Well, signora, perhaps I go now. I can return—"

  "Filippo is trying to convince me I can't live without some more pictures," Clara said, gesturing at three huge paintings propped along the walls, mounted but unframed. "What do you think, Christopher?"

  I looked at them. Each was about seven feet by six and consisted of pallid, empty backgrounds on which a few lurid streaks of purple, orange, and bloody red had been whacked on with a trowel–thick and garish. Two of them were done on pegboard, with the holes clearly showing and even some hooks and brackets attached. They seemed to be examples of Comic Abstractionism, which Penny Hauck, Seattle's curator of contemporary painting, had once explained to me, It was, she said, an ironic Abstract Expressionist movement dedicated to demonstrating the absurdity of the Abstract Expressionist movement in today's image-ridden world.

  I know, I don't understand it either. I'm just telling you what she said.

  "Well?" Clara said.

  If it were I, I thought, I could live without them. "They're not really the kind of thing I'm too informed about," I said delicately.

  "Christopher's very discreet, Clara said. "He means he can't stand them."

  I've been told (by Tony Whitehead, mainly) that I'm not catholic enough in my tastes, that I should strive to appreciate modern and postmodern art more and curb my anachronistic tendency to think in terms of better and worse.

  "Taken in their own context," Tony once demanded, "can you stand there and say that the chipped urinals and rusty bottle racks of neo-Dadaism are any less valid, any less 'art' than the sculptures of Michelangelo, the paintings of Raphael? Can you?"

  "You're damn r—" I'd begun.

  "Of course you can't. You know damn well that art historians don't make that kind of culturally biased value judgment."

  "But I'm an art historian and I make that kind of value judgment, so obviously they do," I'd said, which I'd thought was pretty good, but which didn't seem to strike him as much of an answer.

  This is all by way of saying that Clara was right. I couldn't stand the stuff.

  Croce tipped back his head and laughed indulgently. "You don't like these pictures so much?"

  Not like them so much? I wasn't that keen on being in the same room with them. But I didn't want to offend him. "I work mostly in Renaissance and Baroque art," I said with what was intended as a self-deprecatory smile. "Pretty much representational stuff. The twentieth century's a little new for me."

  "Ah!" Croce exclaimed, interpreting my response as one of ignorance and launching into a vigorous discourse on projective spaces and revolutionary perspectival structure. His English wasn't up to it, forcing him to slip in and out of Italian, which left me even further behind. De
spite his enthusiasm, I couldn't help feeling there was something inauthentic about him, something a little off. Maybe he was selling too hard, which reputable dealers don't do. Maybe it was the checked coat, polka-dot tie, and glittery rings (and pointed, mirror-shined elevator shoes); he was foppish and raffish at the same time, like an old-time music-hall performer. Maybe it was the way he kept smoothing that plastered-down hair. He just didn't look like a trustworthy dealer to me.

  But then I don't look like a bona fide art curator.

  I wasn't worried about him putting anything over on Clara, who stood in a corner, impassively watching him go through his paces. "I don't think you're going to convert Christopher," she said dryly when he paused for breath.

  He laughed, not very emphatically, and blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. "I think I don't convert you, either, signora. But that's all right. I leave them here for two, three days, and you decide, all right?"

  "Fine. Call me Monday."

  "Molte grazie, signora. A lunedi prossimo. Arrivederci."

  A bow to Clara, a tentative, quickly withdrawn motion as if to kiss her hand, a bow and a sweaty handshake for me, and he was gone.

  "Are you really thinking of buying these?" I asked her.

  "I am, and don't look so damned superior. Do you know what your problem is, Christopher? I'll tell you. You persist in seeing art solely in aesthetic terms; you refuse to consider it from the standpoint of capital investment."

  I smiled. "That's my problem, all right."

  "Tell me, does your pitifully limited knowledge of this century's art extend to the Italian Transavantguardia?"

  "Mimmo Paladino, that bunch?"

  "Yes, that bunch," she said sarcastically. "I have two Paladinos. Do you know what I paid for them in 1978? A thousand dollars each. Would you like to know what I sold one of them for this week?"

  "I don't think so," I said.

  "I don't think so, either." She laughed suddenly, and her eyes warmed. Her laugh, not a frequent phenomenon, was one of her few redeeming physical features. When I said that Clara was ill-favored, I was putting it mildly. She was a bulky, shapeless woman with pockmarked skin and bulging, red-rimmed eyes, one of them disconcertingly larger than the other. I had yet to see her dressed in anything but a capacious, dark dress of indeterminate style.

  "Well," she said, "you're here to talk about the arrangements for your show, yes? So let's talk about them. Come."

  She stumped out of the room. I followed. With Clara, that's what you did. We went to a room with a couple of armchairs and a settee, which was hung with canvases by some of the foremost artists of the Italian Transavantguardia, best left undescribed. As expected, Clara had no unrealistic demands about the security and showing of her pictures, and only a few questions about transportation. These were summarily and satisfactorily dealt with.

  She terminated the discussion with a nod. "So, you want to go look at the paintings, I suppose?" She spoke gruffly, but the light shone again in her eyes.

  I had already seen them more than once, but of course I said yes. To say no would have been unkind; every collector loves showing off her treasures. Besides, I really wanted to. What kind of art curator would I be if I didn't enjoy looking at paintings? Most important, I needed to look at some real art (forgive me, Tony) after having been trapped on Clara's ground floor for an hour.

  The four pictures she was lending were two floors higher: one by Fragonard, one by Van Dyck, and two by a couple of lesser-known seventeenth-century Dutch painters; all had studied in Italy. To tell the truth, none of them were first-rate examples of the artists' work, but they were pretty enough (surpassingly so, after what I'd just been looking at), and historically instructive. The point of Northerners in Italy, after all, was to demonstrate Italian influences on northern European artists who had lived in Italy.

  Those influences were most obvious in the two Dutch pieces, A Village Fair by Jan Baptist Weenix and an evocative Shrimp-Catching by Moonlight by his cousin Nicolaes Berchem, both painted in the 1640s, both set against classical Italianate landscapes complete with the romantic ruins of ancient buildings. Jan Baptist, in fact, had been so thoroughly Italianized he returned to Holland calling himself Giovanni Battista. An early soulmate of Max's.

  The Van Dyck was a portrait of Maria dé Medici done in 1627, at the end of a six-year stay in Genoa and Venice. In it Van Dyck was not at his elegant best; it was almost as if the intense color borrowed from the Venetians had overwhelmed his own restrained good taste.

  Finest of the lot was a mid-sized painting by the young Fragonard. Not one of the congenial, fluffy pieces that would briefly make him the toast of Paris later on, but a classical landscape obviously painted to please his master Tiepolo, airy and alight with clean, clear colors.

  This we stood looking at for some time. "I love the sunlight in this picture," Clara said. "Not lush, like the Caravaggisti, but—what would you call it, Christopher?"

  "A glancing light," I said after a moment, "like real sunlight on real water and trees. It's not of the objects; it's reflected off them. You feel as if it all depends on your own perspective. I'm not quite sure how he did it."

  She nodded, smiling. "A glancing light. Well, come on, it's almost one. I owe you the best lunch in Ferrara."

  "You owe me a lot more than that, but, okay, I'll settle for lunch."

  She drove me herself, in an unpretentious blue Fiat, to La Provvidenza, a restaurant so exclusive there was no sign outside, nothing to indicate there was a restaurant behind the blank white wall. Inside, it was elegant-rustic, with used- brick walls and gleaming wooden floors. It was filled with dark-suited businessmen at the tables, and humming with lithe, sloe-eyed waiters in peach dinner jackets, any of whom might have served as the model for Donatello's svelte, young David. A bottle of Soave was opened and poured without our asking as we sat down.

  "To the Rubens," Clara said, lifting her glass.

  "To the Rubens."

  She drank a third of the wine and put down the glass. Immediately a peach-sleeved arm reached between us to top it off. A few seconds later it returned to lay down menus.

  Clara lifted hers without looking at it. "Will Max really never walk again?"

  "Not well."

  "Well, I'm sorry for him. It's a hard thing." This inadvertent moment of human kindness was quickly made up for. "But he has no one to blame but himself. He's a careless man, not discreet. He shouldn't be in the business he's in."

  "Clara, Max said that there were five people who knew his security systems well enough to disengage them. Amedeo Di Vecchio was one. Do you know who any of the others were?"

  The question surprised me almost as much as Clara. What was I doing, starting my own investigation?

  "Me?" Clara exclaimed. "How should I know that?" A cigarette jiggled at the corner of her mouth while she spoke, her third since we'd left her house twenty minutes before. She had lit up greedily the moment the door had closed behind us. As a collector, she wouldn't smoke around her paintings, but she made up for it everywhere else.

  "In any case," she said, "I don't believe for a minute that Max told only five people. I think everybody in Bologna knew. Max doesn't have secrets. Have you ever been around him when he's drinking?"

  "I know what you mean."

  "Talk, talk, talk," she said, which pretty well summed it up. "I should have sued him at the time, when the Rubens was first stolen."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "Why didn't I?" Clara peered at me with a sober, bleary look that I was beginning to recognize as her version of waggishness. "Christopher, how familiar are you with the Italian legal system?"

  "Not very." And Colonel Antuono hadn't done much to edify me.

  "You're fortunate. It is, should I say, a little tangled, and the results somewhat erratic. We have a saying here: Never sue when you're in the right. It's too risky."

  I laughed, and we ordered from the young waiter who had been standing at the ready. Lunch began with antipast
o from a self-service table against the far wall. I offered to get Clara's for her, but she shook her head and, with a movement of her chin, sent the waiter scurrying for her instead. A good thing, too, because I had all I could do to manage my own. It is not lasagna or fettuccine or tortellini that I dream hungrily about when I think of Italy's food, but the antipasto tables, and the one at La Provvidenza was as good as they come. I loaded my plate with mussels and shrimp, marinated octopus, prosciutto, smoked mackerel, oily roasted red peppers, two gleaming whole anchovies, and a thick wedge of artichoke frittata. Halfway back, I returned to get a roll, which had to be precariously set on top of the frittata.

  This Smorgie-Bob's-all-you-can-eat approach is not the way they do things in Italy, but in my own defense I'll point out that I had had only coffee and a brioche for breakfast, a couple of stale little sandwiches for last night's dinner, and not much else since the attack three days before.

  Clara was already eating when I came back. One of those large people who never seems to eat much, at least in public, she had on her plate only a slice of prosciutto and some cheese. She stopped chewing and studied my heaped plate intently. "I think you missed the squid," she said.

  "I'll get some when I go back for seconds," I told her, and dug in.

  "Christopher," she said after leaving me to it for a few minutes, "this matter of my Rubens. Tell me, what are your impressions of the way it resolved itself? How much do you believe this Blusher's account?" She had finished her hors d'oeuvres and pushed her plate away. A cigarette was back dancing at the side of her mouth.

  I considered the question while I finished chewing a bony, crackling mouthful of anchovy. By now I'd given Mike Blusher a lot more thought, and I knew precisely what it was I suspected him of. In the last few decades the field of art thievery had developed well beyond the crude old days when paintings had usually been stolen and then held for ransom. Now, with the prodigious rewards offered by insurance companies, nasty ransom demands had become unnecessary. You could be more decorous. You merely stole the piece of art, waited awhile, and then turned it in for the insurance reward. All you had to do was come up with some reproachless way of "finding" the object in question and getting the word to the insurance company.