A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  As soon as I pulled the door closed, the car continued slowly down Via Montegrappa, rocking over the alley's uneven cobblestones. I recognized the driver the moment I looked at him: Pietro, the gorillalike thug who had smashed in Max's face and tossed me with such ease into the street, just a block from where we were now. Somehow I wasn't surprised. And I recognized the car now. The last time I'd seen it, it had bounced me around, too; only then I'd been on the outside of it, scudding painfully over the top.

  When we stopped at Via dell'Indipendenza, Pietro turned to study me. It was the first time I'd gotten a good look at him• shaven, compact head on a muscular cylinder of a neck, dull, sleepy eyes in a stolid face with an immense, under-slung jaw. Fred Flintstone without the hair. Bulky arms bulged inside a blue leather jacket like sausages about to burst their casings. Through the jacket's open front I could see the strap of a shoulder holster. I returned his look as steadily as I could, fighting down the impulse to fling open the door and bolt. As we pulled onto the main street he grunted something.

  "What?" I said nervously. "I didn't hear you."

  He looked at me again. The heavy eyelids went slowly down, then up. He had long, thick eyelashes. "Ciao," he said.

  "Oh. Ciao."

  I settled back a little more easily. Nice to know there weren't any hard feelings.

  Chapter 22

  At the end of Via dell'Indipendenza he swung around the Piazza Medaglia d'Oro and into the parking lot of the railroad station. It was 11:00 A.M. There were people milling around in comforting numbers. He pointed at a public telephone. "Go there and wait for a call."

  I walked to the telephone much reassured. If they'd been planning to kill me, I'd be speeding along an untraveled country road by now, not walking unaccompanied through a public place. With that all-absorbing worry removed, I began to get excited. Was it possible that the paintings were really about to be recovered? That I was going to be the instrument? There were all kinds of possible reasons for the recovery being handled in this peculiar way. Maybe the person with the paintings was hoping to collect an insurance company reward, but was fearful of dealing directly with the company or the police. I would be a perfect intermediary: uninvolved, knowledgeable—

  The telephone rang. I snatched it up.

  "Norgren?" The same voice as before.

  "Yes."

  "Listen. There is a buyer for the paintings. But he insists that an expert confirm they are what we say they are. He wanted to bring his own consultant to do this, but he was told no."

  "Why?" I asked, as much to slow him down as anything. He was difficult to understand, and I wanted time to think through what he was saying. And although his voice was still muffled, I was beginning to hear something familiar in the cadence. If I could get him to keep talking . . .

  "Why?" he repeated. "Because I don't trust him and I don't trust his expert, all right? He was told a reliable expert would be provided, a respected museum curator."

  "And that's me?"

  "That's you."

  "Does he know it's me?"

  "When you get there, he'll find out."

  "And he agreed?"

  "No more questions," he said irritably. "What's the difference to you? Now, you will be taken—"

  "Why should I do this?" I demanded. "Do you actually think I'm going to help you get rid of those paintings?"

  I wasn't being particularly brave. The area around the station entrance was filled with people. Pietro was thirty feet away, watching me without interest, placid and sleepy-looking, chewing on something (his cud?). All I had to do if I wanted to get away was duck into the station.

  "You told me I could help recover those paintings," I said. "You didn't say—"

  "And so you can. After you authenticate them and leave, you're free to notify your carabinieri friends as to the buyer's identity. Thus," he said almost affably, "a felonious receiver will be apprehended, the paintings will be recovered for their rightful owners, and you'll have the gratitude of the Italian nation."

  And you'll have your five hundred million lire or whatever it is, I thought. "How am I supposed to know the identity of the buyer?" I asked him. "I don't imagine he's going to introduce himself."

  "You'll know, don't worry."

  "Why are you doing this to him?"

  "I told you, I don't trust him, I don't like him. What do I care—" he stopped abruptly. "Enough questions. There's no more time. Go back to the automobile."

  "Look, I need time to get ready for this," I said brilliantly. "It'll have to wait until tomorrow. I can't just go in and authenticate these things without preparation. I need—"

  "You need nothing! It's now or never, do you understand?" His agitation level had shot up again. "I'm sorry I got involved with this in the first place. It's not worth it—one problem after another ... "

  I knew who it was. There had been one too many familiar phrases sputtered in that familiar, frazzled manner. Bruno Salvatorelli. I glanced again at the bustling, inviting entrance, and at the bovine Pietro chewing away, staring into the middle distance. What if I dashed into the station now? I could get away with ease and tell Antuono what I knew.

  But what did I know? Antuono already suspected Salvatorelli. And I still didn't know where the pictures were. We'd get nowhere, and Salvatorelli would find some other way of disposing of the paintings, perhaps for good.

  ". . . if you don't want to do it," he was ranting, "just say so, you understand me? I'll throw the damned things in the Reno and be done with them!"

  That I doubted, but I couldn't chance it. "All right, I'll do it," I said. "But first I have to know—"

  "You have to know shit," he said, and hung up.

  Pietro drove a few blocks beyond the station to a neighborhood of nondescript apartment buildings. With featureless exteriors of raw concrete, they might have been built ten years ago or ten weeks ago. The ground floors were mostly occupied by small light-manufacturing operations— electrical switches, cardboard containers—or various kinds of wholesalers. All very functional and commonplace. It was hard to believe we were a five-minute walk from the colonnaded Renaissance streets of the city center.

  We parked in front of a ten- or twelve-story building that looked like every other building on the block, and entered a marble lobby devoid of ornament or furniture. I tucked the address away in my mind: Via dell'Abbate 18. We took the elevator to the seventh story and walked to the end of a musty corridor that hadn't seen much recent use; it certainly hadn't seen much care. Pietro knocked on an unnumbered door.

  "Who's there?" someone called from the other side.

  "Pietro" was the mumbled reply.

  What, no secret knock, no coded greeting? What kind of way was this to run a big-time heist?

  The door was opened, first a crack and then all the way. Behind it—no surprise—was Ettore, Pietro's scarred, tough partner with the chewed-up ear and the mashed-down nose. Unlike his more easygoing associate, Ettore apparently hadn't forgiven me for inconveniencing him the previous week. There was no friendly "Ciao," only a malignant narrowing of his eyes and a peremptory jerk of the head to motion me in.

  The moment I was inside, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. The pictures were here, all right; I could smell the acrid, leather odor of old paint and ancient canvas. But all I could see, aside from some scattered, littered pieces of office furniture, was a nervous, buglike man with a polka- dot bow tie, who was standing near the single dirty window and watching us.

  Again with no sense of surprise, I saw that it was Filippo Croce. If anything, I felt a little let down. "Is this the buyer?" I asked.

  "Let's get to work," Ettore said. "Come on, dottore, earn your money. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish."

  He's assuming I'm one of them, I realized. They think I'm being paid for this. Salvatorelli hadn't told them what's going on.

  It had taken a few seconds for Croce to recognize me. "You're their expert?" he asked, advancing. "You're going to authenticate
them?" His tone was part incredulity, part glee.

  What was he so happy about? "Why not?" I responded gruffly. "You don't trust my judgment?" I saw no reason to disabuse anyone there of the notion that I was one of the crowd; just another crook. And I now understood why Croce, as buyer, had agreed to meet with, and be seen by, an unknown third party like me. He'd been told I was "their" expert, a bought, bent consultant.

  "No, no, I trust it implicitly," Croce said. "It's just that I'm quite surprised. Delighted, really. I hope this is the first of many—"

  "Let's get on with it," Ettore growled. "They're over here."

  I went to the dusty table he'd gestured at, and involuntarily let out my breath. What I'd mistaken for an untidy pile of rubbish—rolled-up old blueprints or mechanical drawings— was, it appeared, an untidy pile of rolled-up Old Masters worth approximately $100,000,000. Not that Croce would be paying anything near that. There were also two painted panels, each about two feet by a foot-and-a-half.

  I recognized the panels immediately. Two Madonnas Enthroned, one by Fra Filippo Lippi that had been taken from Clara's collection, and one by Giovanni Bellini from the Pinacoteca. They were a joy to see, their authenticity fairly jumping out at me. All the same, I thought that a little theater wouldn't hurt. I picked them up gingerly, peered at them from a couple of inches away, turned them over, muttered a little, and laid them carefully back on the table.

  "Well?" Croce asked.

  "They're the real thing."

  "Ah!" he exclaimed. "I knew it the minute I saw them."

  He sidled up to me, prattling away. "I saw them and I knew. I had faith, I had conviction. Basically, one appraises from the soul, from the innate, spiritual perception an art lover humbly brings to a timeless work of art. Don't you agree, dottore?"

  I wondered if that was the way he appraised his Comic Abstractionists, too, "Maybe," I said. "But what do you need me for, then?"

  "Faith," he said, "has its limits. This is a business matter."

  "Come on, let's go, let's go," Ettore said. "We're in a hurry." He pointed at the rolled-up paintings. "Get on with it."

  "That's, uh, not going to be possible," I said.

  Croce looked shocked. "Not possible?"

  "Huh?" Pietro said.

  Ettore's battered face hardened in a way that made me back up a step. "What's the problem?" he asked.

  The problem was the condition of the canvases. From the look of them they'd been rolled up two years ago and never unrolled since. Probably they'd been bound with string or rubber bands until today. The rolling-up had been done with care, thank God, but no matter how careful you are, you can't take a thick, stiff piece of fabric that's been out flat for centuries and curl it up into a cylinder without doing harm. The canvas buckles, and the old paint and varnish, friable as a layer of nail polish, splits and loosens. If you then try to unroll it two years later without proper preparation, you multiply the destruction tremendously.

  Add this to the mutilation suffered when they'd been cut from their frames—whatever had been overhung by the lip of the frame had necessarily been sliced through—and the result was twenty-one irreplaceable masterpieces gravely damaged. Sure, they could always be repaired with modem techniques and materials that simulated the old ones, but that magic, indefinable beauty—what it was that had made them masterpieces in the first place—was beyond the reach of twentieth-century formulas and recipes.

  "I can't unroll them," I said, and briefly explained.

  Croce's foxy face clenched with suspicion. "I'm not paying for anything I haven't seen."

  Ettore shrugged. "Please unroll them." He reached for the nearest one.

  I grabbed his arm. He looked down at it, then up at me. "Don't do that, dottore."

  I let go. I was sure he wouldn't need much of an excuse to take up where he'd left off on Via Ugo Bassi. A question of restoring honor, I supposed. He'd been on the pavement when Pietro came along and chucked me into the street.

  "You unroll them," I said, "and they'll crack in a thousand places. They won't be worth anything to anybody."

  The three of them looked at each other, not so sure anymore that I was one of the boys.

  "I won't pay for anything that's damaged," Croce said. He nervously patted his gleaming hair, wiped his hands, and fingered the edge of one of the canvas cylinders, delicately bending up a small corner. It was as stiff as dried leather.

  He bit his lip. "He's right," he said. "But you must understand I can't accept these without authentication. My instructions are clear."

  We were at an impasse. Unrolling them was out of the question—I would have fought off Ettore and Pietro to prevent it—but I didn't want to see the deal fall through, because that would mean the pictures might go back underground for years, maybe even into the river, as Salvatorelli had threatened. I couldn't think of what to do. We all eyed each other uncertainly. Oddly enough, it was Pietro, surfacing briefly from his torpor, who resolved it.

  "Well, can't you tell without unrolling them?" he asked. He picked one up in his big hand—I flinched, but he was gentle—and held it up to his eye like a telescope. "You can see inside a little," he reported hopefully, and handed it to me. "Maybe with a flashlight?"

  "Oh, well, yes, of course," I said quickly, taking it. "All I said was I wouldn't unroll them. I never said I couldn't tell if they were genuine or not." At least I hoped not. No one contradicted me, so I suppose I hadn't. "But signor Croce here said he had to see them for himself, that he couldn't take my word for it."

  Now, as hoped, Pietro and Ettore swung their persuasive glowers in Croce's direction. He cleared his throat, rubbed his temples, tugged on his bow tie. "I'll have to speak with my client about it."

  Ettore jerked a thumb at a telephone sitting in a corner, on the dusty floor. "Call him."

  "No, no, that's impossible. I'll see him tomorrow."

  Ettore shook his head. "No deal. We either do it now, or not at all. You don't trust the great dottore?"

  "Ah, you can trust him," Pietro said reassuringly. "Come on."

  The sides had shifted again. Now it was Ettore, Pietro, and me against the irresolute Croce.

  "All right," he said at last. "I'm at your mercy, dottore."

  So he was; more than he knew. "Don't worry," I told him, "I won't lead you astray."

  I was a little disturbed—but only a little—at my previously unsuspected capacity for duplicity. Tony Whitehead, I'm sure, would have been astounded. And probably delighted. Without giving Croce time to reconsider, I got down to work. I don't remember exactly how I got through the next thirty minutes, but it was a virtuoso performance. I went from one rolled canvas to the next, peering keenly into them (without benefit of flashlight, no less), pointing them toward the window and minutely rotating them—a degree this way, two degrees that way—like big kaleidoscopes. After an appreciative murmur or two, I would make my pronouncement.

  "Aha, Correggio, without a doubt; the soft, painterly, almost antilinear style, the luscious flesh tones. . . And this, this with its icy elegance of line can be nothing but a Bronzino. . . . And this? Let me see—Ah! Tintoretto, no question about it. The masterly use of repoussoir, the receding diagonals . . ."

  It was sheer mummery, of course. I couldn't see a thing. But luckily for me, they had a list of the paintings to refer to, and I somehow managed to bring it off. In a sense I wasn't lying, because I was sure they were authentic, even if I didn't happen to know a few trivial details, such as which was which. I knew it from their smell, their feel, their condition, a hundred little clues. Maybe even by way of a little innately spiritual perception.

  "All right," Ettore said the instant Croce hesitantly nodded his acceptance of the last one. "Where's the money?"

  "I'll drive you there," Croce said, darting his tongue over his lips. His protuberant eyes glistened. He was looking extremely shifty. More so than usual.

  "That wasn't the arrangement," Ettore said. His face had stiffened, darkened, as if a shutt
er had clanked down over it.

  "Of course it was. You're trying to change things now." Croce's voice was on the rise. "What do—"

  "The money was to be left in two packages, wrapped in paper. Somewhere nearby."

  "It is, it is Only fifteen minutes from here. Come, I'll take you."

  "No, you'll tell us," Ettore said stonily.

  "But—" Croce's forehead shone with perspiration. He looked at all three of us, but help wasn't coming from anywhere. "All right, then," he said. "It's in the Giardini Margherita, near the tennis courts. Just to the east of them, in the shrubbery, next to a stone wall, there's a—a concrete pedestal, a vent of some sort with metal grills in the sides. The grill on the east side, away from the courts, toward the wall, it comes off. The packages are inside, taped to the back of it. All right, are you satisfied? Now, if it's all the same to you, I'll take these and leave."

  He said it as if he didn't think he'd get away with it, and he didn't.

  Ettore ignored him. "Pietro, I'll drive out there and see if it's all right."

  "I assure you–" Croce said.

  "If it's all right I'll call, and you can let him have the paintings. Then drive back to where we started from. You understand?"

  Pietro frowned while he absorbed this. "What if you don't find it?"

  "He'll find it, he'll find it," Croce bleated.

  "Well, I guess I'll go now," I put in. "I've done what I came for." Croce was lying, and I didn't want to be there when they found out. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get on the telephone to Antuono.

  I didn't get away with it, either. "You stay, too," Ettore said.

  "What for? I've done what I was paid for. I—"

  "If I don't call in half an hour," Ettore told Pietro, "take the paintings and get out of here."