A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  I pressed him. What about the picture itself?

  What did I think was wrong with it? he wanted to know.

  "I'm not sure if anything is. I don't know Uytewael that well, but the colors seem flat to me. The whole thing seems . . . well, insipid, pedestrian. Not up to his standards."

  "Not up to his standards. Did you ever hear what the painter Max Lieberman had to say about us poor art historians?"

  I shook my head. Laconic he might be, but all the same van de Graaf had a sizable store of obscure but pithy quotations.

  " 'Let us honor the art historians,' " he quoted. " 'It is they who will later purify our oeuvre by rejecting less successful works as "certainly not by the artist's own hand." ' "

  He cackled and I laughed along with him. "All the same, I'm just not comfortable with it, Willem."

  He leaned over it again. His nose wrinkled. "Don't I smell copaiba balsam? Has someone been working on it?"

  "It was just cleaned. 'Touched up,' according to Ugo. I'm not sure just what that means, but I don't think that's what hurt the colors. According to Ugo, the guy is an expert."

  "Ah, but you know what Max Doerner said about experts."

  I didn't, of course.

  "'There are no experts in the field of picture restoration,'" van de Graaf said. "'There are only students.'" He tucked in his chin, folded his arms, laid a forefinger vertically along his upper lip, and continued to peer at the painting with lidded eyes. "Hm," he said.

  We were back where we started. "What now?" I asked.

  "Now? As soon as you give me some peace, I'll take this in back and see what I see."

  "Will you be able to tell me anything today? At least whether or not there are two panels glued together under all the gunk?"

  He hunched his shoulders. "Today, tomorrow, next week. It can't be hurried."

  He meant he couldn't be hurried, but I'd known that when I'd come. Still, there wasn't any particular rush, no reason the painting couldn't be left with him and shipped later.

  "I'll call you, then," I said.

  He was already heading for the double swinging doors to the work area, holding the picture in front of him, studying it intently.

  "Hm," he replied.

  I went upstairs to the museum's public galleries. Anne would be there by now.

  If anyone ever asks me, not that anyone is likely to, what the finest small art museum in Europe is, I will unhesitatingly name the Mauritshuis. There isn't a second-rate piece of work in the place. Not one. Every painting, every object, is a jewel. It's like the Wallace Collection in London or the Frick in New York: a limited but superb collection in an elegant old town house. Walking through the building would be a pleasure even without the pictures. And with them, one can see them all—really see them—and be done in under two hours, still fresh and appreciative. Try that in the Louvre.

  I had arranged with Anne to meet in one of the second- floor galleries, but at the foot of the staircase I hesitated, suddenly apprehensive. Our recent telephone conversations had been exuberant and happy, filled with laughter. But now, in retrospect—and faced with actually meeting her—I'd begun to wonder if there hadn't been something counterfeit about them; an edgy, forced glitter stemming more from the awkwardness of not having talked for so long than from anything else.

  What were we going to say to each other now? When you came down to it, what had we actually said on the telephone? That we were looking forward to seeing each other. That was what second cousins said, or business acquaintances who meet at a convention once a year. Were we—was I—trying to drag out past its allotted time something that wasn't there anymore? How did I know that Anne didn't intend this as a civilized farewell, the final tying up of a few troublesome strings before she went on with her life?

  I turned away from the staircase, chewing my lip. This was no way to approach things. I needed to calm myself down, compose my thoughts. Fortunately, I had a tranquilizer at hand. No, I don't carry around a handy vial of Valium. But I was standing in a gallery full of eighteenth-century Dutch paintings, and if browsing for a while in that lovely, peaceful, orderly world didn't unruffle me, nothing would. I took a slow breath and began to wander through the small ground-floor rooms.

  And within a minute or two, I thought I could feel it working. With a few monumental exceptions, Dutch artists painted little to raise the blood pressure or inflame the spirits. Nobody ever got overexcited looking at Still Life with Turkey Pie or Cheese Seller's Stall at Dordrecht. Josef Capek described Dutch art as the work of seated artists for sedentary burghers. Just the thing for the fevered mind. Knee-deep in metaphor, of course, but only the scholars worried about that nowadays.

  I went slowly, stopping only twice, once to pay homage to Vermeer's View of Delft, the wonderful townscape that revolutionized the painted depiction of light. And then again, before his simpler Girl with a Blue Turban, which has no particular claim to fame other than its being so achingly beautiful. If that didn't soothe me, I decided, I wasn't going to get soothed. So at last I made for the stairs, looking back over my shoulder at the Girl.

  Her limpid brown eyes, you will be interested to learn, followed me every inch of the way.

  Anne had her back to me when I saw her. She was standing in front of a picture of a cow, her face turned up to look at it. Her honey-colored hair was darker than I remembered it, and a little shorter; her shoulders more delicate. She was in civilian clothes—a belted jumpsuit, fashionably baggy at the hips and tight at the ankles, with a jacket over her arm. She looked absolutely terrific. My confidence level, such as it was, ratcheted down another notch.

  I came up behind her, my heart in my mouth. "Hi there, Captain."

  She turned. "Dr. Norgren, I presume."

  "Sorry I'm late."

  "Oh, that's all right. You look wonderful."

  "So do you—just great."

  From that fatuous beginning things got worse. We walked through the museum, hardly seeing it, both of us timid, skating clumsily around each other, searching for something riskless to talk about. How was my flight? What had her meeting been about? How had I liked Sicily? Had she had any interesting assignments lately? Had her brother-in-law recovered from his kidney-stone operation? Had she—

  Finally, she put a finger to my lips to get me to shut up. "Let's sit down a minute."

  Docilely, I sat next to her on an out-of-the-way bench. Around us were peaceable little scenes by de Hooch and de Heem and Terborch—ordinarily the names alone would have been enough to lull me—but they weren't doing me any good now. I was filled with misgiving, terrified at what she might be going to say to me.

  "Chris," she said soberly. "I've been giving things a lot of thought." Her eyes, usually as near to violet as eyes come, had deepened to a glowing blue-black. She looked down at her hands, clasped on her lap.

  "And?" I said, or squeaked.

  "I've been miserable since San Francisco," she said, talking rapidly. "I miss you awfully. I want us to give it another try—that is, if you want to."

  "Me too!" I blurted, practically dissolving into jelly with relief. We leaned our foreheads together and laughed, a little jerkily from the release of tension. I realized that she'd been as worried as I had. A few museum visitors glanced at us with understandable irritation.

  "Whew," I said, and grabbed her hand. "Come on, let's get some air."

  We left the museum, walking around the corner and then along the edge of the Hofvijver, the square, fountained, "lake" that sets off the dignified old Parliament buildings.

  "So," I said, "what do we do?"

  She smiled and squeezed my hand. "Seems to me we're already doing it."

  "I mean after today. How do we handle it? You have to stay in the Air Force—"

  "I want to stay in the Air Force. For one more year, anyway."

  "And I have to and want to stay at the Seattle Art Museum, six thousand miles away."

  "True. What would you suggest?"

  "We could get marr
ied," I said, startling both of us.

  "Married?"

  I shrugged. "In for a dime, in for a dollar."

  She burst out laughing. "You just got divorced. You've been single all of five months."

  "Right, I gave it a fair try. Between you and me, it's not what it's cracked up to be."

  She stopped and studied me. "Are you serious?"

  "Of course. Well, I think so. I just thought of it."

  "But how would getting married change anything? I'd still be in the Air Force, you'd still be in Seattle."

  "So what are we supposed to do?" I asked again. "Just see each other from time to time, whenever I get over to Europe or you get to the States?"

  "Why not? Why do we have to do anything? Why can't we just take it as it comes, see how it turns out? When my tour of duty's up, we can see how we feel."

  "Well, sure, I suppose we could," I said doubtfully, "but—"

  "Chris, did anybody ever tell you you have this need to tie everything up into nice, neat, black-and-white packages?"

  "Yes," I said.

  Only Tony called it "trying to deoptionalize nonprogrammable contingencies." Louis saw it as "a counterproductive aversion to ambiguity due to faulty self-esteem." I forget what Bev called it, but she had a name for it, too, I was starting to think maybe they had a point. Either that or everybody liked ganging up on me. And even Louis had never accused me of having paranoid inclinations.

  "Isn't it enough to just be together again?" she asked. "To be friends again?"

  She had moved closer to me, putting her hands against the lapels of my jacket and looking directly up into my face. There was a barely noticeable little twitch in the soft skin below her eyes, something that showed up when she was anxious or insecure. Anne wasn't even aware when it was there, but for me it always had a compelling, waifish poignancy. I embraced her; for the first time in five months I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. Unexpectedly trembling, I bent my face down to her hair and inhaled the fragrance. I could feel her shaking, too.

  It was more than enough.

  The paintings had put us in the mood for some plain, hearty Dutch cooking; the sort of thing that would have looked right on one of those scarred old tables in a scene by Ian Steen or Adriaen Brouwer. In most Dutch cities it would have been easy to find an appropriate restaurant. Dutch cooking may not often figure in discussions of the world's great cuisines, but of plain and hearty there isn't any shortage. The Hague, however, is the least Dutch city in Holland, as the Dutch themselves like to say. Full of foreigners on expense accounts, it's easier to find a plate of escargots á la bourgignonne than a bowl of humble, nourishing erwtensoep.

  All the same, with half an hour's diligent perusing of the sedate, embassy-lined streets, we managed to locate a signboard with a red, white, and blue soup tureen on it. In Holland this signifies a small restaurant promising just what we were looking for: traditional food and old-fashioned cooking.

  The promise was delivered on. We ordered smoked herring and hutspot, a beef-and-vegetable stew that gave robust new meaning to "plain and hearty." And while we ate, I told her the long, tangled story of my last few weeks, from Blusher's Rubens through Ugo's dubious Uytewael. As you can imagine, this took a while. By the time I finished, we were done with our stew and had moved on to a nearby pannekoekhuis for crepes and coffee at a sidewalk table under the plane trees.

  "Somebody's tried to kill you twice?" she said, stirring sugar into her coffee. "My God."

  "Only once. They weren't trying to kill me on Via dell'Independenza."

  "They ran you down with a car but they weren't trying to kill you?"

  "I mean it was Max they were after. I was just incidental. If I hadn't run back to help, nothing would have happened to me."

  "All right, once, if it makes you feel better—"

  ''It does."

  "—but why even once?"

  I shook my head. "It's got to have something to do with the thefts. That's all I can think of."

  "But what? Were they trying to keep you from finding out something?"

  "I don't think so. Once I left for Sicily I wasn't planning on coming back to Bologna, except to catch a plane to the States, and everybody knew it. So there wasn't any risk that I'd uncover anything new."

  "What then?"

  "All I can guess is that it's something I already know. Or that they think I know."

  "Like what?"

  "Maybe they're afraid Max told me the names of the people on his list; the people who knew his security systems."

  She shook her head. "No, if that was it, why would they wait until you were leaving? If you were going to tell the police at all, you'd already have told Antuono."

  "Yes, you're right."

  "Chris, could it have something to do with the Uytewael? Could someone have been trying to keep you from finding out it's a fake?"

  "Who? Ugo's the only one who's likely to suffer over it." "Well, Ugo then. I know he's your friend and you like him—"

  I laughed. "You and the police; you both keep trying to pin it on Ugo. Look, if he didn't want me to find out the picture was a fake, he didn't have to blow me up. All he had to do was not show it to me. I didn't even know it existed."

  She took a halfhearted stab at her jelly-filled crepe. "Colonel Antuono must have a theory about all this. What does he think?"

  "I'm not sure he does have a theory—about why someone would want to kill me, I mean. What he's interested in is the paintings, period. Any corpses that happen to get produced along the way are incidental nuisances."

  "All right, what's his theory about the paintings? Who has them?"

  "According to him, the whole thing was organized by the evil masterminds of the Sicilian Mafia."

  "But you don't think so."

  "No. When I was in Sicily I had a conversation—more like an audience—with the Mafia padroni and unless I got led down the garden path, they don't know anything about it."

  She sat back and eyed me quizzically. "An audience with the Mafia padroni." She sighed. "Tell me, Chris, is this what life is like for other art curators, too, or is it just you?"

  "It's just me. Anyway, the only time these guys showed any interest was when they thought I might know Sylvester Stallone."

  "Maybe you were talking to the wrong padroni."

  "Maybe. Antuono claims the ones involved are in Bologna now. Apparently, he's close to some kind of deal with them to get the pictures back."

  "Chris . . . should you really be going back to Bologna, even for a night? Somebody tried to kill you there."

  "No problem. They think I'm dead."

  "They—?"

  "Oh, did I forget that part? Yes, Antuono 'disappeared' me. He put out a story to the press that I'd been successfully blown up. So I'll be safe. In any case, I have to go back. I wound up coming straight here from Sicily; most of my things are still in Bologna."

  "Oh." A perceptible hollowness had come into our conversation. Anne was looking down at her empty cup, turning it slowly on its saucer. "What time do you have to go?"

  "I'd better head over to the train station at four," I said. "It takes about an hour to get to the airport."

  She looked at her watch. "Fifty minutes, " she murmured. I cleared my throat. "What about you? When do you leave?"

  "I've got a military flight at a little after eight." She suddenly looked up at me. That delicate, oddly affecting tic below her eyes was back. "Chris, couldn't you—"

  "Anne, couldn't we—" I said at the same time, and we both laughed.

  We could and we did. Anne had some time off due her, and there wasn't any pressing reason I couldn't take a few days' vacation, too. The post office across the street had a rank of international telephone booths from one of which Anne convinced the United States Air Force that they could get by without her until the following Monday. I wasn't able to get through to Seattle, but I'd try again later. We came out of the post office hand in hand, delighted with ourselves, but as yet
undecided as to where we would spend the time.

  "We could stay here, Anne suggested. "Maybe in one of the beach hotels."

  "Except that my things are still in Bologna."

  "What about going back then? All that good eating—"

  I made a face. "Maybe we can do that another time. For the moment, Bologna seems to have lost its charm for me."

  Besides, although I saw little danger in returning for a single night, I wasn't keen on being seen around the city by anyone who was under the happy impression he'd killed me. Especially not with Anne at my side.

  "Well, how about going back long enough to get your things?" she asked. "I can try and get a seat on your flight. Then tomorrow we can go someplace else. Have you ever been to Lake Maggiore?"

  I shook my head.

  "It's wonderful. I know a hotel in Stresa that's straight out of the eighteenth century. You'd love it—stuffy and old- fashioned—"

  "Thanks a lot."

  "—and romantic as they come."

  "That's better. Uh, you've been there?"

  "Yes; by bus, as part of an R and R group tour, not that it's any of your business. It can't be much more than three hours from Bologna by train. The water is this incredible turquoise-green, and there are lemon trees and pomegranates and coconut palms, and the Borromean Islands are like a set from Sigmund Romberg. We could just laze around and take it all in. What do you say?"

  What would anybody say? We went directly to the KLM terminal in the central railroad station to get her a seat on the plane. Then we picked up the bags we'd both left in the luggage room and boarded the train for the airport. I couldn't seem to stop grinning.

  And no longer, even in my heart of hearts, did I carry a shred of resentment toward Calvin for his long weekend on the Riviera. Poor Calvin, with his dreary, eternal flitting from woman to woman. My heart went out to him.

  Chapter 19

  When we arrived at the hotel in Bologna, there was a note in my box: Willem van de Graaf had called. I was to telephone him at home if I got in before eleven. And, I was informed at the desk, another gentleman had telephoned that morning. Although he had become somewhat agitated at missing me, he had left no message except to say that it was quite important and he would call again.