A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

"Now you'd better listen to me—" Croce began.

  "What about these two?" Pietro asked.

  "Take them with you. If they don't want to go, beat the shit out of them. If they give you too much trouble, just shoot them and leave them."

  Pietro nodded and patted his jacket, over the holster.

  This exchange effectively silenced Croce. I wasn't making much noise, either. But a few minutes after Ettore left I probed for a little more information from Croce.

  "Who's your buyer?" I asked offhandedly.

  He frowned at me. His eyes swelled with affront. No stratum of society is without its code of ethics.

  "Shut up," Pietro said. He sounded edgy. "I don't want any more talking. Sit down."

  We sat. So did Pietro, first meaningfully unzipping the front of his jacket. It had begun to rain. For a long time the only sounds were the water thrumming against the window, the traffic noises, and the occasional whine of a jet.

  Pietro looked at his watch frequently. After the ninth or tenth time he spoke: "Ten more minutes."

  "Don't worry," Croce said with an unconvincing laugh, "he'll call. That vent isn't so easy to find."

  Fifteen minutes later the increasingly uneasy Pietro looked at his watch a final time, chewed his lip, and came to a decision. He stood up, shoved a big leather suitcase across the floor with his foot, and pointed at Croce. "You."

  "Me?"

  "Put those wooden ones in there." The more nervous he got the more he slid into a kind of slow motion.

  "These?" Croce said. "The panels?"

  Pietro's heavy eyelids drooped. The big muscles in his heavy jaw moved. He took a ponderous step forward.

  "All right," Croce said hurriedly. "Very well. They'll have to be wrapped first. I can—"

  "No wrapping," Pietro said. "Just put them in."

  "But he's right," I said. "You can't just toss them into a suitcase without protection. They'll be—"

  The gun came out: stubby, nickel-plated, toylike in the big hand. It waved me quiet, then leveled at Croce. "Do what I say."

  "Certainly, at once." Croce knelt, opened the suitcase, and lay the two Madonnas side by side in it, handling them with more reverence than I imagined him capable of.

  He glanced up from his knees. "At least let me—"

  "Now you," Pietro said. The shiny little gun jerked in my direction to indicate which you he was talking to. "Put the rest of them in there, too, quick."

  I didn't see much room for argument. I picked up the first rolled cylinder, placed it in the suitcase as carefully as I could, and reached for the next one.

  It was too methodical to suit him. "Come on, come on, just throw the damn things in."

  "Look—" I said.

  Pietro gestured for silence again, then stood motionless, head tipped, sleepy eyes suddenly alert. He was listening intently. All I could hear was the rain. He edged up to the window, his back against the wall, and scanned the street, shielding his body behind the casing. I was reminded of a hundred old movies. This was the scene just before the final barrage of bullets from the cops killed all the bad guys. Or maybe it was Indians, arrows, and ranchers.

  Pietro turned back to us. "That's it. We're going right now. You, close the suitcase and pick it up," he told Croce. "You"—me again—"grab the rest of them and let's go."

  "What do you mean, grab them?"

  "Just scoop them up. Hurry up."

  "Scoop them up?" I echoed. "You mean just—just—"

  With his left hand Pietro reached around the side of the gun's barrel. There was a click that I recognized (those old movies again) as the safety being released. I gulped, bent to the table, and, as carefully as I could, gathered them up in my arms, all twenty-two of those precious, irreplaceable masterpieces, like so many old window shades to be taken down to the dump.

  "Now," Pietro said, "out the door."

  But at that moment the door, about four feet to Pietro's right, exploded from the wall with a window-rattling crash. Even before it hit the floor a stream of men in heavy vests and blue police uniforms burst into the room, shouting incomprehensible orders and brandishing handguns and rifles. Croce was swept out of the way. Pietro was still blinking with surprise, waiting for his brontosauruslike nerve impulses to make it to his brain and tell him what was going on, when the gun was deftly plucked from his hand. Two burly officers spun him roughly around and shoved him face-first against the wall. More men crowded in; there were brown carabinieri uniforms along with the blue ones. The room was all dust and pandemonium.

  I couldn't believe it. I was so relieved I wanted to cheer. I think I did cheer. I know I laughed. "Your timing's great!" I shouted over the racket. "We—"

  "Alto!" several of them screamed. "Zitti!" I didn't have to be told that these amounted to the Italian equivalent of "Freeze!" At the same time three pistols—heavy, malevolent black weapons, nothing like Pietro's shiny tiny toy— were thrust out at me, trained on the bridge of my nose. All were held by palpably overstrung men in the classic shooter's posture: tautly crouched, gun hand stiffly extended and supported at the wrist by the opposite hand. All three of the weapons were quivering.

  Me too. It took me a moment to find my voice. "Gentlemen," I said in my softest manner and without moving a finger, "I . . ."

  I what? I wasn't really heading for the door with $100,000,000 worth of stolen art in my arms? It only looks that way? I shrugged and closed my mouth. Things would work themselves out. The worst was over.

  Almost. A slight figure approached from the side and peered at me. There was a long-suffering sigh.

  "Weren't you supposed to be in America?" asked the Eagle of Lombardy.

  "I can explain," I said, staring straight ahead. "Really."

  "If you will put those paintings down over there," he said quietly, "I will do my utmost to see that these gentlemen don't shoot you."

  At his nod and a few murmured words, they lowered their weapons—rather reluctantly, it seemed to me—and turned away. Antuono, in his black undertaker's suit, looked down his fleshless nose at me as I placed the rolled-up canvases back on the table.

  "Colonel—"

  "You could have been killed," he said. "Worse, you might have ruined the entire operation."

  His prioritizing of possible outcomes did not escape me. "Colonel—"

  "Do you know," he said musingly, "if you hadn't turned up blundering about in the midst of things—with the best of intentions, of course—I think I would have felt a sense of disappointment . . . of incompleteness."

  He hadn't wasted any time getting under my skin again. I faced him angrily. "I didn't have to be here, you know—"

  "Indeed."

  "I put my life on the line for those paintings. If you'd let me, I could have been helping you all along."

  "No doubt."

  "Damn it, I told you days ago that Croce was involved, didn't I? But no, you—"

  His attention had wandered. He was looking over my shoulder, a slow smile actually lighting up his pale eyes. "Wonderful work, Major," he said. "A year's effort—congratulations!" He reached around me to shake hands. "I believe you already know dottor Norgren?"

  I turned.

  "Sure, we're old friends," said Filippo Croce.

  Chapter 23

  Yes, that wonderful facility of mine to make razor-sharp character judgments had done me in again. The odious, transparently disreputable Filippo Croce was in fact Abele Foscolo of the Comando Caribinieri Tutela Patrimonio Artistico; one of Antuono's most trusted undercover agents. Antuono, in what I now recognized as one of his little jokes, had practically described him to me at our first meeting, specially grown mustache and all.

  For almost a year Foscolo-Croce had been working meticulously to establish his credibility as a shady dealer, first building a suspect reputation in Sicily to provide "credentials" that could be checked when he appeared on the scene here. Antuono and Foscolo had quickly zeroed in on the Salvatorellis, but as Antuono kept telling me, it was the paintin
gs he was after, not the people. The important thing was to get the pictures safely back.

  And so, just about the time I got to Bologna, Foscolo had begun working his oily charms on Bruno (Paolo had just been killed). The two Pittura Metafisica paintings "discovered" in the Trasporti Salvatorelli warehouse had of course (in retrospect, "of course") been planted by the police. Salvotorelli had truly known nothing about them. The raid had been staged to give him convincing proof that Foscolo was indeed the crook he appeared to be, and that he had art-world connections. More important, he was shown to be a "trustworthy criminal"—the phrase was Antuono's, delivered with a straight face. What he meant was that, inasmuch as no arrests were made, "Croce" demonstrated his reliability at keeping names to himself when required.

  In a way, this had all been explained to me days ago by Antuono himself, on our drive back to town from Trasporti Salvatorelli. He'd neglected to mention only a couple of trifling particulars: It was fact, not surmise, and Croce happened to be working for him.

  And all this time I'd gone along thinking he didn't have much of a sense of humor.

  "You must see, dottore," he said now, leaning over the table and clasping his hands, "that I couldn't very well let you in on our plans. I had to mislead you just a little. I hope you accept my apology."

  We were in the Palazzo d'Accursio, not in Antuono's makeshift warren of an office, but in a big, handsome upstairs chamber that he had commandeered, with thick, wall-to-wall red carpeting, red-flocked wallpaper, and massive old furniture. I had been making statements and signing depositions in one part of the palazzo or another for the last three hours, except for a twenty-minute break I'd insisted on to call Anne and tell her what had happened to me.

  "I was starting to wonder," she'd said dryly when I reached her. "You hear these stories . 'Yes, well, the last time I saw him he said he was going down to the corner for cigarettes. That was back in '54, of course.' . . ."

  But I'd heard the breathy tremble in her voice, and it had warmed me. And now for the last hour I'd been basking in a different kind of warmth, one not experienced before: the freely given gratitude of a relaxed and expansive Eagle of Lombardy. Antuono had been openly impressed with the information I'd provided on Max and Blusher. He had immediately arranged to have Max placed under arrest for murder and attempted murder, and since then he'd been—well, friendly. And unless I'd misheard him, he'd actually offered an apology a moment ago.

  "I accept it," I said, "but you misled me more than just a little. You also told me Salvatorelli wasn't a suspect."

  He nodded. "We were very near to moving, as you now know. Your ... explorations were threatening the sensitive balance we had achieved. I wanted you out of our hair." He smiled, pleased with himself. "I believe that's the American expression."

  "Well," I admitted, "Salvatorelli had me fooled all by himself, even without your help. I thought he was just another harried businessman." I uncapped one of the small green bottles of mineral water an aide had brought, and poured it into a glass. "And what do you know, he's tied up with the Sicilian Mafia." I drank down the water thirstily, my third bottle.

  Antuono smiled. "Well, I wouldn't say that. The Milanese Mafia, yes, but that's all. I doubt that the Sicilian Mafia had any direct part in this."

  I put down the glass and stared at him. "But you told me— twice you told me—no, three times, you said the Sicilian Mafia was—" Laughing, I sank back against the chair. "You just made it up, right? Also to keep me out of your hair."

  "I'm afraid so, dottore. It was regrettable but necessary."

  "No wonder they had no idea who the hell I was down there."

  "They. . . ?" Antuono's eyebrows went up, but then he thought better of it, probably out of fatigue, and decided not to pursue it, which was fine with me.

  Something else had occurred to me. "And is that why you told me you didn't want me ferreting information out for you—"

  "Correct."

  "—even though you'd already told the FBI you wanted some help?"

  He nodded. "By the time you arrived in Bologna, we no longer needed help. We were sure Salvatorelli had the paintings."

  So what Tony had told me about Antuono's asking for my assistance was true, which meant I owed Tony an apology. I grimaced. I hate it when I owe Tony an apology.

  I stretched somewhat stiffly, realizing for the first time just how spent and grubby I was. I'd done a lot of sweating that morning and I needed a shower. And I wanted to be with Anne. "Am I free to leave now?"

  "Yes, but tell the clerk where we may get in touch with you."

  I stood up. Antuono, watching me with his head tipped against the highbacked old chair, suddenly barked with amusement.

  "Did I say something funny?" I asked.

  "I was thinking of all your warnings to me about the infamous Filippo Croce. It was hard not to laugh at the time, dottore. What do you think of him now? Foscolo's good, no?"

  I laughed back. "I still don't trust the guy."

  We had been on the train for almost two hours. Anne had a paperback mystery open on her lap and I was leafing through the skimpy European edition of Time. Both of us were doing more dozing than reading.

  It had been a grueling day. By the time I'd gotten back to the hotel and showered, it was after four. Anne got the idea of seeing whether there was a train that would get us to Lake Maggiore that evening, instead of waiting until the next morning. There was; the Rome-Geneva Express would make a two-minute stop in Bologna at 5:04 P.M. We took a taxi to the station, stopping at a grocery store for sliced mortadella, rolls, fruit, and a liter of red wine with a twist-off cap. By the time the train cleared the northern outskirts of Bologna we were happily gorging ourselves in our seats, and since then, dopey with food and wine, we'd been drowsily watching the countryside glide by.

  Now, we were in the darkening Po Valley south of Milan; flat, rice-growing country with great, rectangular tracts of flooded land separated by long rows of poplars and willows. Power lines alongside the track bed zoomed and swooped. My eyelids started coming down. The magazine folded into my chest.

  "Chris?"

  "Mm?"

  "That agreement of ours—to pick up where we were and just let things take their course. Does it mean we don't see other people, or doesn't it?"

  "Go to bed with other people, you mean?" That was my aversion to ambiguity asserting itself again.

  "Well, yes."

  I lowered the magazine. "What's this? Do I detect a need to put things into nice little black-and-white boxes?"

  "Come on, I'm serious."

  "Tell me how you feel about it," I said, treading carefully.

  She looked out the window. We were whizzing through the only crossing of a tiny village. Bells clanged faintly. "I suppose we shouldn't lay down any rules," she said slowly. "We're adults. We'll be thousands Of miles apart. If we feel like seeing other people, we should."

  "And if we don't feel like it, we shouldn't."

  "Definitely."

  "Well," I said, "I don't think I feel like it."

  "Good," she said with a sigh, "I'm glad that's settled." She stuffed the book into the pocket on the seatback in front of her, folded up the chair arm that was between us, and settled her head against my shoulder. "I'm going to see if I can get some more sleep."

  "Hold it," I said, pushing her off. "What about you?"

  "What about me? Are you saying that just because you made a commitment, you think I'm obligated to make one, too? Is that the sort of relationship you picture us having?"

  "Damn right."

  "Chris, that kind of controlling relationship went out in the sixties. You're being manipulative."

  "Damn right. Well?"

  She looked at me, head tilted, lips pursed, then forcefully pulled my arm against her, patted my shoulder down like a pillow, and settled in again.

  "Well, you're lucky," she said against my chest. "As it happens I don't think I feel like it, either."

  About the Author
/>
  Aaron Elkins is the author of the Gideon Oliver series, one of which, Old Bones, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award as Best Mystery of the Year. He lives near Seattle, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. A Glancing Light is the second in his three-book series about art curator Chris Norgren.

  His Web site is www.aaronelkins.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author