A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  It was safer, less complicated, and more civilized than trying to collect ransom, less dangerous than trying to fence stolen art. The money was better, too. On the black market the going rate was only three or four percent of the value, as opposed to the ten percent most insurance companies would pay. And, as in Blusher's case, one could even wind up with some favorable publicity as a bonus.

  After all, wouldn't you want to buy a fake antique ashtray from the guy who discovered the famous stolen Rubens?

  But it took patience, ingenuity, and care, none of which had seemed to be Blusher's strong suits. Or had I underrated him? Was he more patient, ingenious, and careful than I'd thought? I was beginning to believe it was possible. And if ever an operation was made for processing stolen art, Venezia Trading Company was it. Remember Chesterton's famous question about the best place to hide a stolen Madonna? Well, apply it to a stolen painting and the answer was surely among five hundred look-alike paintings.

  There was another possibility, too. It might be that Blusher wasn't in it alone. It might be that Trasporti Salvatorelli was more in the thick of things than Luca and Di Vecchio gave them credit for, and the whole affair had been concocted between them and Blusher. After Blusher collected his reward and the dust settled, the money would be split. Or maybe not split. Maybe the Salvatorellis had been behind it, and Blusher was only a hireling who would receive a small cut.

  I told all this to Clara, almost beginning to believe it myself. She sat listening, fingers steepled against her upper lip. "Christopher, let me ask you this." She leaned forward, shaking another cigarette from her pack. Before she got it to her mouth the peach-sleeved arm shot forward with a lighter. She sucked in a deep lungful and wedged the cigarette in the corner of her mouth as before. "Assuming that something crooked is going on," she continued, "why do you think the Rubens is the only picture to surface in this way? Why none of my other paintings? Why none stolen from the Pinacoteca?"

  "I suppose," I said doubtfully, "that the theft of the Rubens might have had nothing to do with the others, that it was a different gang. A coincidence."

  She snorted. "On the same night? Within a few hours of the time my Correggio and my Bronzinos were being taken from my home?" She shut her eyes for a moment, mourning her Correggio and Bronzinos. "Don't be ridiculous."

  I nodded, agreeing with her. "Why, then?"

  "I'm asking you."

  By now our second courses had come. I had a couple of mouthfuls of a fragrant risotto con funghi while I thought about it. "Clara, do you happen to know if all the paintings stolen that night were insured by the same company?"

  "They were, yes: Assicurazioni Generali."

  "Well, then, the Rubens could have been a feeler, to see if the insurance company would come through and be cooperative—you know, no hard questions, no investigation, no charges."

  She cocked her head, evaluating the idea. "It's possible, yes."

  "Now may I ask you something?"

  She lifted her head warily.

  "How did they manage to steal the paintings from your house? How did they get in?"

  "What's the difference?" she said gruffly, poking away at her spaghetti alla Bolognese. "It's water under the bridge."

  "Didn't you have security systems in place?"

  "Of course I had security systems in place. What do you think?"

  "Well, who knew about them?"

  "Nobody knew. You think I'm your friend Max?"

  "Do you think it was an inside job? Somebody on your staff?"

  "No." She was mumbling into her food. I could hardly hear her.

  "Well, then, what—"

  The hand holding the fork thumped exasperatedly on the table. "They weren't turned on, all right? I forgot to turn the damn things on!"

  "You—" I did manage to keep down a sudden burst of laughter, but something must have twitched somewhere, because she raised her fork menacingly.

  "The merest hint of a smile and you'll be impaled, Christopher. I warn you."

  I said: "I was startled, I wasn't amused," half of which was true.

  It had been a fleeting moment of amusement, however. Clara had my sympathy. Comic Abstractionists and Trans-avantguardists may have represented so much capital investment for her, but her love for the Old Masters was as deep as mine. To lose a Correggio from carelessness . . .

  "I take my paintings down fairly often," she said quietly. "Sometimes I would forget to reactivate the systems." She lifted her shoulders in a glum shrug. "Sometimes I would forget for days."

  I nodded my commiseration. "It happens."

  It does, too, unbelievable as it may seem. Clara's case was far from the first example. The most recent one, as far as I know, happened a few years ago on Christmas Eve when a priceless group of pre-Columbian artifacts was taken from the great National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. How did the thieves get in? They got in because the alarm system was switched off. How did they know it would be switched off? They knew because it had been switched off ever since it had broken down three years earlier.

  "I leave the alarms on all the time now," she said grimly.

  I didn't doubt it. The National Museum of Anthropology does, too.

  Chapter 9

  I'd barely had time to put my feet up after getting back to my hotel room when the telephone rang.

  "Hi." The familiar voice on the other end said. "I'm here. "Where've you been?"

  "Uh . . . Calvin?" It took me a second to remember that Calvin Boyer, the Seattle Art Museum's marketing director, the man who had hustled me off to Mike Blusher's warehouse, was coming to Bologna to take care of his end of the arrangements for the show. The plans we'd laid in Seattle only last week seemed from another lifetime.

  "Right, sure," he said. "Let's get together. We ought to go over some stuff."

  "Where are you, downtown?"

  "Yeah, I'm staying at the Internazionale, a couple of blocks from you."

  We agreed to meet in half an hour, at 6:00, at the Caffè Re Enzo, a café-bar in the arched stone colonnade of the Podesta Palace, the long, fifteenth-century building that forms the northern side of the Piazza Maggiore. It was a place we'd had drinks in when we'd been in Bologna on a preliminary visit six months earlier.

  It was only a five-minute walk for me, but I headed right there, chose a good table looking out over the piazza, and ordered an espresso, which was quickly brought, along with the usual tall glass of water. Then I settled down, my head tipped back against a carved rosette on one of the ancient, peeling columns, to wait for Calvin and take in the scene.

  Bologna's Piazza Maggiore is enormous, one of the world's great public squares. Offhand, the only open civic space I can think of in Italy that is larger is the one in front of St. Peter's, and this one is livelier if not quite as handsome. Directly across from me, some 500 feet away, was the hulking Basilica of San Petronio. To my right, making the piazza's western border, the Palazzo Communale (with Colonel Antuono no doubt in his stuffy little "office" at that very moment, happily ferreting away his dog-eared folders in his dog-eared cardboard boxes). On my left another long, porticoed building, the Pavaglione, completed the perimeter of the square. Five big tour buses stood next to one another at one corner of the basilica, hardly noticeable in the vast space.

  And in the center, milling about on six acres of stone- block pavement, were the people. Ordinarily, I don't go in much for people-watching, but when I'm in Italy I make an exception. The scene before me was a bigger version of the one that can be found in the main plaza of any Italian town in the late afternoon of a fine day. At about five o'clock you can count on groups of talkative old men beginning to materialize. I've yet to make out where it is they all come from. The square just gradually fills up, like a swimming pool being fed through a hole in its bottom. After a while, women and younger people also appear and get into the act in smaller, marginally less voluble numbers.

  It always gives me the feeling that the curtain's just gone up on a crowd
scene in a Donizetti opera, that it's all being choreographed for my benefit, and that in another moment everyone will burst into glorious song. They never do, of course, but they gather into noisy clusters, talking, laughing, arguing, jabbing each other with their index fingers, eloquently smacking their own foreheads and lifting their hands to the sky. Every now and then—at least to the eyes (and ears) of a phlegmatic American observer—they give every appearance of being on the verge of physically attacking each other, only to have the crisis dissolve into laughter and good fellowship.

  Add to this a few hundred kids chasing the whirring flocks of pigeons that inhabit the place, and a few hundred tired, overexcited tourists trying to keep up with tour guides who are brandishing red or yellow umbrellas and urging them on with exhortations in German, Japanese, and French, and you have a bracing spectacle that's worth a trip to Bologna in itself. Not something I'd want to do every evening, you understand, but once a visit anyway.

  Calvin showed up as I was finishing my coffee. "Six hundred years working on that church, and they still can't get it right," he said, slipping into a chair across from me. He was looking at the Basilica of San Petronio, begun in 1390 and, as Calvin had pointed out, with its marble facade not yet completed.

  I laughed. "You can't hurry these things." A profundity worthy of Benedetto Luca himself.

  Calvin took his first good look at my face. "Jeez, what happened to you? What did you do, get run over by a train?"

  "A car," I said, and explained.

  He listened, his chubby, rabbity face gloomy and intent, then thought a long time before speaking. "If you work it right," he said, "our workmen's comp insurance ought to cover you."

  That was why he was a marketing director and I was just a curator.

  "It's okay, Calvin. My own policy'll pick up most of it."

  He shrugged. "Suit yourself. Well, I'm glad you're okay."

  The waiter appeared. Calvin ordered a Cynar, one of those peculiarly bitter European aperitifs along the order of Ugo's Jazz! They claim it's made from artichokes, and I don't doubt it. Somewhere, somehow, Calvin had actually gotten to like it. I asked for a martini, which in Italy brings you a small glass of Martini-brand vermouth.

  "So," Calvin said after his first sip. "Did you hear about Mike Blusher's reward?"

  "I heard he's getting $150,000."

  "Correction, we're getting $150,000."

  "Come again?"

  "Blusher's donating the money to the museum."

  I was stunned. "To us? All of it?"

  "Every bit. In appreciation."

  "For what?"

  Calvin grinned. "I'm not too clear on that part. For helping him get the publicity he wanted, I guess. And this is getting him even more. He actually made Time this week. Or, who knows, maybe he just felt guilty taking all that money for doing nothing. Tony said not to ask too many questions, just take it and say thank you."

  "That I can believe. Well," I said with a sigh, "I guess Blusher's not pulling anything after all."

  "Well, sure," Calvin said, blinking his surprise, "what did you think?"

  For all his pitchman qualities, Calvin is at heart an innocent. It's one of the things I like about him.

  "No matter," I said. Why harass Calvin with the complex and nefarious schemes Clara and I had been hatching in Blusher's behalf? None of them held water anymore anyway. A guy who gave away $150,000 to which he was legitimately entitled could hardly be accused of pulling a fast one.

  So why didn't I trust him, even now?

  A gusty wind had whipped up. A square of tissue paper, the kind local vendors used for making little cones to wrap fruit, blew up onto the table and caught on the stem of Calvin's glass. He brushed it away. "Blusher followed your advice on the other one, by the way."

  "What advice?"

  "You told him to take that van Eyck—"

  "That fake van Eyck."

  "—in to Dr. Freeman to have it X-rayed."

  "Oh, yeah. But I didn't tell him to, I just said he could if he wanted to. What did she find?"

  "I don't know. I haven't heard."

  "Well, she's not going to come up with anything, or at least not what Blusher's hoping for. There's no Rembrandt or Titian under that van Eyck, Calvin. Nobody paints over a—"

  "I know, I know. You told me. Hey, you want to go get some dinner?"

  I nodded. The wind was beginning to make things unpleasant, not just because it was sucking little whirlpools of litter and grit up onto the table, but because it had driven many of the old men from the square into the protection of the long portico. They had not noticeably adjusted their volume, so that what had been a charmingly boisterous clamor now sounded like a war happening a few feet away.

  I waved to the waiter. "Il conto, per favore."

  "Watch this, watch this," Calvin whispered to me. He pulled out a thin black calculator the size of a checkbook. It had what I had come to recognize as the look of one of his airline gift-catalogue toys.

  "Automatic currency converter?" I asked.

  He shook his head.

  "Expense analyzer and recorder?"

  He shook his head again. He was punching keys and concentrating hard, his tongue sticking out.

  When I'd paid the waiter, Calvin motioned for him to stay, punched another key, and held out the calculator to him. The waiter looked confused. Calvin kept sticking out the calculator. The waiter glanced at me for help. "Prego. . . ?"

  I shrugged. I didn't know what Calvin was doing, either.

  Finally, the waiter took the calculator from him and looked at the display. He smiled politely and looked at me again. This time it was he who shrugged.

  Calvin took it back and showed it proudly to me. The display said "WHERE IS / DOV'È, DOVE C'È"

  He went back to punching buttons while the waiter remained restively at the table. There were a lot of people waiting to be served. "Calvin," I said, "I can ask—"

  "Sh, sh." He made a mistake, muttered, hit a few more buttons and grinned. This time he showed the display to me first: "A GOOD RESTAURANT / UN BUON RISTORANTE,'

  "Ah," said the waiter again, and began to reply.

  "No," Calvin said, and tapped the calculator. "Here."

  He handed it back to the waiter. "It works both ways," he told me proudly.

  "Calvin," I said, "he's in a hurry. There are a million people here, and he's the only waiter. Why don't you just let him tell us?" According to Clara Gozzi's standards, my Italian might stink, but this I could handle.

  Calvin did some grumbling about the calculator's costing $170, but pocketed it with reasonably good grace while the waiter told us about a restaurant a few blocks away on Via Nazario Sauro, then quickly made his getaway.

  To get there we crossed the Piazza Nettuno, a small square named for the famous sixteenth-century fountain by Giovanni da Bologna in its center, a flamboyant, thirty-foot high wedding cake of bronze and stone topped by a nude, muscular, triumphantly male Neptune. At its base sirens riding dolphins squeezed their ample breasts, producing five jets of water from each nipple. Four sirens, forty streams. Michelin demurely describes the whole thing as having "a rather rough vigour."

  Calvin paused, studying the sirens appreciatively. "Oh, Debbie said to say hi," he said absently, then flushed. Debbie was the young woman who handled incoming calls in the staff offices, the one Blusher had inquired about in his genteel way, "the one with the knockers." You didn't have to be Louis to figure out the association.

  He fumbled in his pockets and came up with an envelope. "She gave me your messages, the personal ones anyway."

  I opened the envelope and pulled out two telephone message slips. The first was from "Mr. Poulsen." The message was "Can't get to you till 5/1." I turned slightly away from Calvin, suddenly feeling naked. Five days gone, and only two personal calls, one of which was from the plumber who was supposed to repair my garbage disposal unit. It didn't say a lot for my life outside of work.

  The other was more persona
l, but it didn't do anything to raise my spirits, either. The caller was described as "Anne." Under MESSAGE Debbie had written: "No message. Just wanted to say hi."

  Anne.

  I stuffed the envelope into my pocket. "Come on," I said a little roughly, "let's go find this restaurant."

  The meal with Calvin was not what you would call sparkling. He told me his plans for the next couple of days: meetings with Di Vecchio's staff at the Pinacoteca and with Luca. I told him about mine: a visit to Trasporti Salvatorelli in the morning, a meeting of my own at the Pinacoteca in the afternoon, and then, the following day, off to visit Ugo for the weekend.

  Calvin was talkative, as always, but I had turned gloomy and uncommunicative, and after a while he tired of carrying on a conversation with himself. We parted company early, and Calvin went off to to whatever Calvin does at night in unfamiliar cities. I went back to my room at the Europa and moped.

  You will have noticed by now that there's no woman in this story. Well, sure, there's Clara Gozzi, but you know what I mean. This absence of a Significant Female Other in my life was not the result of personal persuasion. It was just that things hadn't been going well for me in that regard lately.

  My divorce, only eight months old, had come after ten years of a marriage that I thought was going just fine. I loved Bev, I was happily faithful to her, I enjoyed her company. We laughed a lot, our lovemaking was terrific, we liked the same music, the same food, the same sports, the same people.

  And then one Saturday, when I got back from looking over a Mantegna Head of St. Paul that the museum had just gotten from Geneva, she wasn't there. No note on the refrigerator door, no clothes cleaned out of the closet, no nothing. She was just gone. This, mind you, after we'd casually agreed that morning on the Chinese restaurant we were going to for dinner. Two horrible days followed; repeated telephone calls to the police, the highway patrol, the hospitals. There was even one awful visit to the morgue. In the end I found out she'd moved in with a stockbroker, a guy I'd never even heard of. Moreover—worse, in a way—she'd been having an affair with him for a year and a half completely without my knowledge or even my suspicion.