A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  "An Italian gentleman or an American gentleman?" I asked.

  "Italian," I was told.

  "Maybe it was Colonel Antuono," Anne suggested a few minutes later in our room.

  "Not likely. The Eagle of Lombardy doesn't get agitated." She stretched and covered a yawn with the back of her hand. "I'm beat. I think I'll take a hot shower."

  I smiled happily at her. How quickly we had relaxed into the old rhythms, the old, easy intimacy. On the flight from Amsterdam I'd begun to get a little anxious about how comfortable we'd be with each other once we were alone. I'd even considered raising the possibility of separate rooms, at least for the first night, until we got used to one another again. Fortunately, good sense had prevailed.

  "Go ahead," I said. "I'll give Willem a call and see what he's come up with."

  The receiver was picked up on the third ring. "Willem, this is Chris Norgren. Is it a fake?"

  "A fake?" Surprisingly, he laughed. "Yes, I suppose you could call it that. Amusing, in a way."

  I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that. Amusing wasn't a word I associated with van de Graaf. Willem didn't have a sense of humor so much as a sense of irony.

  "The cañamograss around the edges is no more than a few months old," he told me, "and not real cañamograss at that."

  That was what I'd thought from the beginning. What was so amusing about it? "And?" I asked warily.

  "And the panel is actually two separate layers laminated together, the process being disguised by the cañamograss."

  Also as I'd thought. "Willem," I said, "why do I feel as if I'm waiting for another shoe to drop?"

  "Shoe?"

  "Willem, is the Uytewael a fake or isn't it?"

  "No," he said, "the Uytewael is not a fake."

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. "What?"

  "It's not Uytewael at his best, but it's Uytewael, without question."

  Just what Di Vecchio and his people had concluded. "But you said—"

  "The Uytewael is authentic. The back to which it's glued is not. It's an imitation, a very good one, of a seventeenth- century Dutch panel. But it's quite recent."

  This took a few seconds to sink in. "You're telling me someone took a genuine Uytewael, sawed off the front of it—"

  "Evidently."

  "And then glued it onto a fake panel-back?"

  "Precisely."

  "Why? What could possibly be the point?"

  "I was hoping," van de Graaf said, "that you could tell me."

  "The question is, what did they do with . ."

  Whatever I was going to say trailed away. I stood frozen and mute, the receiver pressed against my ear. I was at long last having a moment of real insight, obvious and startling at the same time—what the psychologists call an aha experience. There was a link between at least some of the disparate happenings of the last few weeks; specifically, a link between Sicily and Seattle, between Ugo Scoccimarro and Mike Blusher. How could I have failed to see it, or even to guess at it, before?

  "Have to go, Willem," I mumbled. "Hold on to that painting. I'll be back in touch soon."

  More thoughts crowded their way in; more links, more possibilities. Hypotheses sprang from hypotheses, like a crossword puzzle being filled out every which way at once.

  The telephone rang the instant I put it down.

  "Chris, is that you? It's Lloyd.'

  "Lloyd?" I was still tracing out the crossword puzzle.

  "As in 'Lloyd from the Seattle Art Museum'? Your place of employment? Lloyd, the director's faithful administrative assistant—the director who, I might add, has been seriously concerned about you since you failed to arrive on your scheduled flight, and has had me searching hither and—"

  "Oh, God, I forgot to call, didn't I? Look, I'm back in Bologna—"

  "No, really? Do you mean, Bologna, Italy?"

  I sighed. This was Lloyd's typical mode of conversation, and I was generally up to it. But not now. "Lloyd, I'm sorry. Something important came up. Is Tony in? I have to talk to him."

  "I'm not sure. Just a minute." There was a pause for muffled conversation. "Chris? I'm afraid our leader is out, but Calvin Boyer is just pulsing to speak with you. Hold on, he's going to his desk."

  A few seconds later Calvin came on to the line, pulsing. "Chris—hey, did you hear about Mike Blusher?"

  It took me a moment to respond. The talk with van de Graaf was still rumbling around my mind "No, what now?"

  "They arrested him, can you believe it?"

  That cleared my head. "You bet I can," I said with enthusiasm. "For what, fraud?"

  "You got it. The FBI was in here talking to us about it this morning. They got him in a sting. He's selling the Terbrugghen all over the place. There are four of them, at least. They nailed him with a fake Uruguayan. This guy from Oman—"

  "Wait a minute, will you, Calvin? Slow down. What's a fake Uruguayan?"

  "Well, a real Uruguayan. You know, an Uruguayan- American. He was supposed to be a millionaire from Montevideo or someplace, but he's really an FBI agent. Capisce?"

  "No," I said irritably. "Slow down, will you?"

  "All right, pay attention, don't interrupt." There was a pause and a slurp; his afternoon Coke, straight from the can. Then, more slowly, if not that much more coherently, he explained. In the end, after many questions and explications, a more or less intelligible story emerged.

  A week earlier, an Omani hotel magnate and novice art collector, Mr. al-Ghazali, who was in New York for several days of auctions at Sotheby's, had gone to the New York Police Department to express certain reservations about a purchase he had tentatively agreed to make—not from Sotheby's, but from a Mr. Michael Blusher, who was also there for the auctions.

  According to Mr. al-Ghazali, he had recognized Blusher at a cocktail party at the Central Park South condominium of a Manhattan art dealer and had approached him on the terrace to congratulate him on the spectacular discovery of the Terbrugghen. Blusher had asked him if he collected Old Masters, and al-Ghazali had replied laughingly that he was thinking about it inasmuch as the Impressionists and the Modems seemed to be priced beyond reach. They had then each gone on to talk with other people, but as the party was winding down, Blusher had suggested they have dinner together.

  Afterward, over truite fraîche grillée at Lutece, Blusher had revealed that he was interested in quietly selling the painting to a discreet buyer. He had come on strong—"like a yacht salesman," al-Ghazali disapprovingly said later—but the Omani's interest had been aroused all the same and they had talked price. Blusher had asked $850,000, al-Ghazali had offered $300,000, and they had settled on $425,000, contingent on al-Ghazali's later examination of the painting in Seattle.

  Blusher, too, had a condition: that the sale not receive any publicity, at least for the time being. The only reason he was letting the painting go, he had explained, was that he was in a financial hole, and if word of it got out, others would guess the reason, something that would do his business no good. Al-Ghazali had accepted the condition, and they had shaken hands on it over the soufflé au Grand Marnier.

  But later the Omani began to have second thoughts. He was new to collecting and unsure of himself, and the hard sell hadn't sat well with him. Nor had the secrecy, the emphasis on discretion. The following evening, at another party, he had chatted with a South Korean newspaper publisher who, like al-Ghazali, was in New York for his first major auction. The Korean had astonished him by saying that Blusher had offered him the Terbrugghen over lunch. The Korean, in fact, was under the impression that his own conditional offer of $330,000 had been accepted.

  Stung by this evidence of bad faith (and very likely by the lower price the Korean had gotten), al-Ghazali went to the police. He was referred to an art-squad detective who in turn contacted the FBI's white-collar crime squad, which had already been following Blusher's much-publicized art adventures with skepticism if not outright suspicion.

  "Ha," I said on hearing this.

  "
What?"

  "I said ha. They weren't the only ones. Didn't I say all along he was pulling something?"

  "Did you?" Calvin said. "I don't remember that."

  "Go ahead, Calvin."

  The FBI had quickly gone into action. A few days after Blusher returned to Seattle, he was approached by a Portland art dealer claiming to be an intermediary for a rich Uruguayan interested in making some, ah, discreet art purchase, preferably without the usual bothersome and time-consuming forms and declarations.

  Blusher had leaped slavering for the bait. The mysterious Uruguayan had been shown the Terbrugghen, with the over-painted "van Eyck" now removed, and a price of $400,000 had been agreed upon. The Uruguayan, who preferred to deal in cash (Blusher had cheerfully agreed to this), would return with the money the next day.

  Instead, a team of FBI agents and Seattle Police Department detectives had arrived at Venezia with both a search warrant and an arrest warrant. In a closet next to Blusher's office they had found the Terbrugghen. Within an hour they'd uncovered three identical copies. "Exact duplicates, front and back," was the way they put it in their report.

  At first, Blusher had claimed that they were all part of his legitimate authentic-simulated-masterpiece business. Then he had changed his mind and gone to a modified version of his mistaken-shipment-from-Italy story. Then he had decided that he wanted to talk to a lawyer, after all, and had said no more.

  I sighed with satisfaction. It was just as I'd thought. The panel on which Blusher's Terbrugghen was painted had, of course, come from Ugo's picture, the back of which had been sawed off and replaced with an imitation. The Terbrugghen had then been forged directly on the genuine panel, which would have been a little thinner than before, but so what? Old panels were hardly uniform in thickness. Then, to spice up the eventual "discovery," the Terbrugghen had been painted over with the van Eyck.

  Blusher, after gulling me into suggesting that he have it X-rayed, had taken it to the university. There, Eleanor Freeman had been startled to see (in a shadowy radiographic exposure) what looked very much like a Hendrik Terbrugghen painting underneath the fake van Eyck. Who could blame her for leaping to the conclusion that she'd found a lost masterpiece? As Tony had said: "Why the hell would anyone paint a first-class forgery, then cover it up with another one so nobody could see it? That's crazy."

  Not so crazy, it seemed.

  "So he had three copies of the original made," I said slowly, "maybe even more, and he was selling them off as the original at three or four hundred thousand dollars apiece. He makes over a million dollars, and the joke is that even the original was a fake to begin with."

  "Some joke," Calvin said.

  After he hung up I kicked off my shoes, lay back on the bed with my hands clasped behind my neck, and closed my eyes. I was beat, too, but my mind was buzzing.

  "Sounded interesting," Anne called from the bathroom. I could hear her brushing her hair.

  "The Terbrugghen's a fake," I said dreamily.

  "I heard."

  "A fake seventeenth-century Dutch painting on a real panel."

  "Uh-huh. Chris, you can talk normal-speed. I think I'm capable of following this."

  "And the Uytewael is a real seventeenth-century Dutch painting on a fake panel."

  I heard her come out of the bathroom, still brushing. "So I gathered. Quite a plot."

  "Damn, I should have figured it out long ago. I knew Ugo's picture'd been tampered with the minute I looked at it, but I got going in the wrong direction and I couldn't get turned around. I couldn't get off the idea of a forged painting. I hardly looked at the back. It never occurred to me the panel was forged."

  "Well, of course not," she said supportively. "It wouldn't occur to anyone." She brushed without speaking for a few seconds. "Chris, do you think that's why they tried to kill you? To keep you from finding out?"

  "I guess so. I just wasn't as smart as they gave me credit for."

  More brushing, slow and silky. What a lovely sound, I thought.

  "Anne, I'm starting to think I might know who 'they' are. But I still haven't put all the pieces together. I need a little more information. And I think I can get that tomorrow."

  The brushing stopped. "Chris ... shouldn't you just tell Antuono and let him handle it?"

  "Not quite yet, I think. Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything dangerous. I just need to stop by the hospital first thing in the morning and get one more piece from Max. Then I'll go straight to Antuono, I promise. And then we'll be off to Lake Maggiore. Noon at the latest."

  "Well ... all right," she said doubtfully. The sound of hair being brushed resumed. I opened my eyes. She was standing at the mirror in a pale-green shift, her bare arms upraised, brushing rhythmically.

  I watched her with simple, mindless pleasure. "Is that what they're wearing in the Air Force these days?"

  And as I said it I realized that I could put to rest another one of the San Francisco-based worries that had been nagging at me all day. My hormones were functioning just fine, busily—even eagerly—performing their appointed tasks.

  "You bet." Her reflection smiled at me from the mirror. "Standard government issue. Like it?"

  "Not too bad," I said. "Why don't you come over here so I can see it better?"

  Chapter 20

  One more piece from Max. With it, unless I was way off track, I'd be able to fit most of the rest of it together. I'd have a why and I'd have a when, and I could stop looking over my shoulder. The trouble, I thought, was going to be getting it out of him. But as it turned out, I needn't have worried.

  Clearly, he was well on the way to mending. With his bed cranked to a sitting position he looked comfortable, even cheerful. His face had lost its pallor and begun to plump out, and his mustache was sprouting again, as exuberant as ever, if a little grayer. The metal contraptions on his legs were still in place, bulky and awkward under the sheet, but the ropeand-pulley arrangement had been removed, so the place didn't look like a torture chamber anymore.

  He was reading a magazine, propping it on a tray attached to the bed. He was, I saw with surprise, smoking a small black cigar; somewhat gingerly but with obvious relish. As I pushed the door quietly open he was putting the cigar down on a saucer to take a sip from the spout of a covered plastic cup, all the time continuing to read.

  "Hi, Max," I said.

  His hand twitched, his head jerked up. The cup dropped onto the floor and bounced into a corner. The cap popped off. Orange liquid spurted over the linoleum. Max's eyes bugged out at me. "Chris!" He gagged, coughed. "I thought you were—I thought—"

  And the last major piece dropped firmly into place. "What did you think I was, Max?"

  "I—" He got his voice going again. "I thought you were still in Sicily." He managed a flabby smile. "Hey, I'm glad to see you, buddy. When did you get back?"

  I shook my head. "You dropped that cup because you thought I was still in Sicily? You practically choked because you thought I was still in Sicily?"

  "Well, you gave me a start, partner. I thought—"

  "You thought I was dead, Max."

  As of course he had. That was what I'd come to find out, what I'd expected to find out, and what I'd been hoping I wouldn't find out. The story Antuono had put out to the press had said simply that a taxi on its way to the airport had been blown up, resulting in the killing of an unidentified passenger. Why should Max or anyone else assume it was I—unless they'd had a hand in it? "I think it might be helpful," Antuono had said, "if the person who tried to kill you were to believe he succeeded."

  And so it had been. It had helped me find my would-be killer: none other than my old friend Max. Signor Massimiliano Caboto—lively companion, drinking crony, jolly descendant of the illustrious Giovanni Caboto.

  As moments of triumph go, I thought sourly, this was far from a winner. I didn't feel like exulting, and I wasn't even consumed with satisfyingly righteous wrath at Max's perfidy. On the other hand, I wasn't wallowing in the Slough of Despon
d, either. Vexed, that's what I was. I'd wanted it to be Croce, or maybe Salvatorelli, or best of all, the evil, faceless Mob; I certainly hadn't wanted it to be Max, and the fact that it was made me damn irritated with him.

  "Wait a second now," he said, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. "My mind's about as sharp as a doorknob with all the pills I pop. You know, now that I think of it, I think somebody did mention you were dead."

  "Oh, sure. Who would that have been, Max?"

  "Well, let's see now . . ." He picked up the cigar and took a couple of puffs, temporizing like mad. But who was there to name that I couldn't easily enough talk with later?

  "No, it was you, Max," I said. "You're the one who had that bomb put in my bag."

  He had gained back his wits by now, and decided the way he wanted to play this. He blinked at me through the cigar smoke, his expression humorous and wry, a man who didn't quite get the joke yet, but was willing to go along with it. "All right, I'll bite. Tell me, why would I want to put a bomb in your bag?"

  "To keep me from finding out that you'd cut away the back of Ugo's Uytewael and replaced it with a phony back."

  "Ah, I see. Of course." A flick of ash into the saucer. "And just how the hell would I manage that? I've never even had it in my shop. Check with Ugo."

  "I did check with Ugo. He said you're the one who worked with the shippers to have his collection sent down to Sicily. Obviously, you'd have had plenty of opportunity."

  Or maybe not so obviously. It had taken long enough to occur to me.

  "Opportunity?" Max said. "What does that have to do with anything? Amedeo had it in his museum for a week. Benedetto Luca could have gotten his hands on it there, too. So could the whole damn staff. Clara Gozzi's the one who brought it back from London, for Christ's sake. Or are you accusing her, too?"