A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  Neither would I, and certainly not on the basis of a certificate of guarantee.

  "I'd like to do it more directly than that," I said. "Lorenzo told me that all your copies have a secret design drilled through the paint layers. I'd like to know what that design is, and where, so I can be sure it's not on any 'genuine' painting in the show."

  Bolzano's gray eyebrows slowly climbed. "You want me to tell you ... ?"

  "I explained that was impossible, Christopher," Lorenzo said sternly.

  Bolzano's dog now had its head on his knee. His blunt fingers slowly worked the loose skin of its neck. "All right," he said simply. "Lorenzo, you'll make a copy of the key and give it to signor Norgren. Signore, I know you'll treat this information with discretion."

  Lorenzo stared mutely at him, his eyes popping with surprise.

  "I want this settled," Bolzano said. "Signore, will that relieve your mind?"

  I hesitated. There was something else, but I didn't look forward to Bolzano's reaction. "There is one more thing," I said warily. "I'd like your permission to have some of the paintings scientifically analyzed if need be." I held my breath.

  So did Bolzano. I thought for a moment that it was all over, that he was going to renege on The Plundered Past and have me thrown out of the house as well. The dog's eyes popped open as his hand inadvertently tightened on its fur. Then the hand loosened and the bullet head nodded once, firmly. "You have it."

  Tony Whitehead has told me that I've fouled up a lot of deals by an overinsistence on clarity, that there are a lot of things better left open to interpretation. I suppose he's right; I'm uncomfortable when things aren't out on the table. "You understand," I said, "some tests might require the removal of material: a sliver of stretcher-bar for radio-carbon dating, a tiny cylinder of pigment—no more than a few hundredths of a gram—for microscopic core analysis—"

  It was too much for Lorenzo, who leaped gawkily to his feet, toppling a white plastic table lamp off a white plastic end table. "Can you be serious? Destruction of the painted surface? Of a Rubens, a Hals? A 'mere' few hundredths of a gram from a Vermeer?" He looked down at me with a choked, incredulous laugh.

  Bolzano, very somber, let him finish. "If you have to make physical tests, make them," he said quietly to me.

  We both stared at him, Lorenzo not much more surprised than I was. It wasn't the sort of thing a collector willingly submitted to. When Lorenzo finally got his mouth working to protest, Bolzano talked over him.

  "I want this settled," he said again, more harshly. "I don't want gossip, whispers, insinuations. I trust you, signor Norgren. I know you'll treat the pictures with the respect they deserve."

  "Of course I will."

  "One thing I ask—I demand. Should you find something you believe to be inauthentic—"

  "Father!" poor Lorenzo cried disbelievingly.

  "—then I hope I will hear before anyone else."

  "I promise."

  He nodded, sighing. "Bene. Now. Would you like some more Vecchia Romagna? A little more coffee?"

  "No thank you," I said. It was time to go. I was beginning to feel a little guilty, wondering if I'd put too much strain on him after all. I'd won all the battles, as he'd said, and over the last few minutes the energy seemed to have drained out of him.

  "You've seen the gallery?" he asked as I rose.

  "Yes, Lorenzo took me over it."

  "You liked it?"

  "It's magnificent."

  "And this room?" he said. His look was slyly challenging.

  I looked at the immense Rothko behind him: three formless, immense, dark dabs on a red background. Next to it was an even larger Twombly, looking like nothing so much as a big blackboard covered with a child's orderly twirls in chalk.

  "It's, uh, quite interesting—"

  He laughed. "You don't like postpainterly abstractionism?"

  I didn't even know that's what it was called. "Well—"

  "Neither does Lorenzo. But let me tell you something: The paintings you saw upstairs, the objects in the other rooms—those are my reason to live. Every time I buy a work of art I train myself, I commit myself, intellectually and spiritually, to its essence. My involvement with my paintings is total, total. I converse with them, I become them. They are my life."

  It is an indication of Bolzano's rough charisma that he could deliver even a speech like that in a credible way.

  "So my days are full of intensity, full of unattainable strivings, you see. And then I come here." He gestured at the walls. "I look at a de Corolli, at a Klos, and it's wonderful; I can relax. They don't mean a damned thing."

  I burst out laughing. "Guggenheim once said the same thing about his Kandinskys."

  "Well, then, I'm in good company. You'll tell me what you find?"

  "Definitely."

  "Maybe you'll have nothing to tell."

  "I hope so. Sincerely." But I doubted it.

  Later, Lorenzo drove me back to the Hotel Augustus. There were, of course, no parking spaces on the Via della Scala, so he stopped in the middle of the street in front of the hotel.

  "Christopher," he said, leaning a bony elbow on the steering wheel, oblivious of the honking and shouting behind us, "do you remember the questions you asked about the packing of the paintings? Did I oversee it? Did I actually see the crates closed up ... ?"

  "Yes, I remember."

  "Well, there's something I didn't mention. I don't see how it can be important, but still ..." He paused to roll down the window, shake his fist and make Italian gestures at the impatient drivers behind, then roll the window back up.

  "What I want to tell you is, yes, I did see the screws go in. But the next day, the day before they were shipped, someone came and had them opened."

  "Someone?"

  "The small man, the assistant to Colonel Robey. His name—"

  "Edgar Gadney? Egad?"

  "Yes, that's it."

  "Egad had them opened? Why?"

  "I don't know," he said sheepishly. "Some sort of paperwork I don't understand these things very well. I had to commute to Rome that morning, but I gave my permission."

  I sat silently, thinking that over.

  "What else was I to do?" Lorenzo asked nervously. "He's an official of the exhibition, a representative of your governmnent. Was I not to trust him?"

  "Was Peter with him?"

  "No. He went back to Berlin as soon as the packing was done, along with the other one, Flittner."

  "And your father was in the hospital. So what you're telling me is that Gadney had a day all to himself with the paintings. In open crates."

  "Well . . . yes. The workmen were there, of course. Christopher, you're not suggesting ... you don't mean to imply that—"

  "Lorenzo, I just don't know," I said honestly.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning I breakfasted in the hotel's little bar with its fake but charming rococo ceiling. The meal was brought by Luigi, the ageless, taciturn man who had worked at the Augustus ever since I'd begun coming, and whose duties seemed to consist of serving breakfast from seven to nine, manning the never-very-busy switchboard, and wandering the hotel for most of the day, sniffling, plumping cushions, and mumbling to himself. In all the seven years I'd been a client, he had never said anything more to me than "Caffè o tè?"

  No, I take that back. In the old days, the hotel had served inexpensive fixed-priced dinners to guests, and once, reading the menu incorrectiy, I had asked for frutta e formaggio as the final course. "No, sir," he had sternly intoned, wagging his head, and then continued in Italian, "Not fruit and cheese." His finger prodded the appropriate line on the dittoed menu. "Fruit ... or ... cheese!" This burst of prolixity had never again been equaled.

  " Caffè o tè?" he said to me this morning.

  "Caffè, per piacere."

  Luigi grumbled off to the kitchen to get it.

  Caffè, of course, was caffè latte, a huge pitcher of espresso and an even bigger jug of hot milk, to be mixed toge
ther in a cup large enough to bathe your head in. Along with it came hot rolls, pastry horns, zwieback, cheese, and preserves. Breakfast was another one of the reasons I kept coming back to the Augustus.

  Just as I finished, Luigi returned, driven by extremity to converse once again. There was a telephone call for me, which I could take in the lobby if I wished.

  It was Herr Traben of the Kunstmuseum, joyfully calling to tell me that he had a plan that met with the approval of the insurance company and museum counsel. I would take formal possession of the El Greco, which would be crated in my presence, on the following Friday—provided that the trip through Frankfurt to Rhein-Main Air Base was made in the museum's armored truck under museum guard. Once within the limits of American military jurisdiction, the painting would be fully released to me. Did I agree to this?

  I did, as laughably overcautious as it seemed. (I'd carried equally valuable masterpieces on my lap in the coach section on United; and I'd certainly never felt the need of an armored truck before.) Then I telephoned Robey to give him the good news about having the El Greco in time for the opening. It took him a moment to remember what I was talking about, and then he said he thought that was nice.

  "And Mark? Can you let Harry know? He'll want to make some security arrangements for getting it from Rhein-Main to Berlin. It's going to be too heavy for me to lug."

  "Fine, good idea," he said vaguely. "Will do."

  I made a note to talk to Harry myself when I got back.

  My flight didn't leave until ten-thirty, which gave me an hour or so to visit my favorite museum. No, not the Uffizi, which, fabulous as it is, is no one's favorite museum, being laid out in a wearying series of stuffy cubicles opening off two endless corridors. (Uffizi means "offices" in Italian, and those are what it was built as in 1560.)

  Only a few blocks away, however, is the thirteenth-century palace-museum that is the Bargello, roomy and never crowded except in July and August. The Grand Council Chamber of the Bargello is surely one of the loveliest rooms of art in the world, and it was there I went. In it are some of Donatello's finest sculptures: the handsome Saint George, the two Saint Johns, the svelte, effeminate little bronze David with which Michelangelo's stupendous marble version would contrast so effectively seventy years later. There are some gentle, touching lunettes of della Robbia too, and other things worth looking at, but it is the room itself that is so wonderful.

  The vaulted ceiling must be eighty feet high. Light pours in visible shafts through narrow windows, streaking the old red-tile floors with long, pale swatches of light. Above all there is a feeling of open space. There aren't more than thirty objects in the whole big chamber, almost all of them on pedestals—not a glass case in sight—so everything has twenty or thirty feet of open space around it. There's so much space that the floating dust motes and the cool shadows combine to make a sort of natural sfumato, so that you feel as if you're in the smoky, shaded, middle distance of a painting by da Vinci or del Sarto.

  I had discovered a long time ago that this serene and stately room is a place to think and sort things out. Near one of the arched stone doorways is a bench that might have been made for contemplation, and it was there I sat.

  What did I know? I knew, or thought I knew, that The Plundered Past had had no forgery in it when it was originally crated in Florence; Peter had had two full days with the paintings and had seen nothing suspicious. That meant one of two things: First and most probable, the forgery hadn't come from Florence at all but was one of the three from the Hallstatt cache. They had been out of sight for forty years with plenty of opportunity for skulduggery, the Bolzanos had never gotten a hard look at them, and it could be that with all the tumult and publicity surrounding them, Peter hadn't, either, until later. That would account for his taking so long to discover it.

  The less likely possibility was also less attractive: The forgery was part of the collection that had been shipped from Florence, all right, but it had been slipped in after it was in American care; that is, one of the famous originals had been made off with, and a fake—a most excellent fake, I knew—had been put in its place.

  Now, substituting a fake for a familiar painting is extraordinarily difficult and complex, over and above the problems of artistic reproduction. It requires an immense amount of detailed information, such as the weight and balance of the picture and its exact appearance, including the auction-house marks or other annotations on its back, repairs that have been made to the frame, and so on. Such information simply cannot be gotten without inside help. And that meant someone on the exhibition staff would have had to be involved. (That's what made the idea so unattractive.) And that someone was very likely to be a member of the senior staff.

  Gadney, for instance. What the hell had he been doing that day in Florence? I couldn't imagine what kind of paperwork would require opening the crates, but then it was the army that was doing the shipping, and I didn't doubt that they had paperwork requirements I'd never dreamed of. That wouldn't be too hard to check. In any case, Gadney had had a day alone with the opened crates, right in the palazzo, within striking distance of the copies—while Bolzano was in the hospital, Lorenzo was off to Rome, and Peter and Earl had gone on to Naples. That hardly proved him a criminal, but it did give me a suspect to start with, and that gave me a sense of making some progress.

  Would that mean that Gadney had something to do with Peter's murder? I rolled that around my mind while I used my last fifteen minutes to make a lightning tour of the rest of the Bargello. (I always like to stop and look at the young Michelangelo's smarmy, godawful Bacchus downstairs because it soothes me with proof that even the best of us can have bad days.) By the time I walked back out through the great courtyard, I had decided that wondering about Egad's role in a murder was going a long way beyond what the facts, such as they were, warranted. Anyway, that part of it would have to be Harry's job; I had the forgery to figure out.

  I did a little more figuring on the Alitalia flight from Florence. There was another possibility aside from the two I'd already considered. Maybe the forgery was something that had been in the Bolzano collection all along. That would mean either that Bolzano and Lorenzo hadn't been aware of it... or that they had. But if the admittedly expert Bolzano and his son hadn't spotted it in years of living with it, how could Peter have found it in a few weeks—and how could he think I could find it in a cursory walk-through?

  As for the idea that either of the Bolzanos had knowingly permitted a forgery to be part of the show, that made no sense at all. People with fakes in their collections don't put them on public exhibit to be scrutinized by thousands.

  By the time I changed to a Lufthansa 707 in Frankfurt— only flights originating in Germany are permitted to land in Berlin—I had exhausted the subject and myself, and I let my thoughts wander to something more pleasant.

  Anne Greene. Somehow, thirty thousand feet above it all, with a little plastic jug of coffee and an Apfelstrudel on the tray in front of me, it seemed like a good time to haul out and consider something that had been niggling away at me, buried under weightier matters: Why had I behaved to Anne at the staff meeting like such a condescending and supercilious prig? And then, a couple of days later, why did I back off so cravenly from the prospect of dinner? It certainly wasn't that I found her unattractive; on the contrary, I liked the way she looked, I liked the way she spoke, and I liked, from what I could tell, the way she thought and felt.

  Was I still loyal to Bev or, rather, loyal to the idea of being married to Bev, and unwilling to risk a step that would make an end of it? Maybe, but what was left to make an end of? I knitted my brows, sipped the surprisingly good coffee, and considered. Was it simply a matter of "once burned, twice shy?" Having walked trustingly, even eagerly, into one lousy relationship, was I afraid of blundering into another? Did Anne's very attractiveness frighten me into a defensive stance that shielded me against more damage to my shaky ego?

  Where was Louis when I needed him? I sighed and, as the
wheels thunked down on the Tegel runway, put it all out of my mind.

  For about forty-five minutes. As soon as I got to Columbia House I dialed her room.

  "Well, hi," she said. "What happened in Florence?"

  "It went fine. Bolzano's pacified."

  "Congratulations. The colonel will put you in for a decoration."

  "Oh, it wasn't too hard." I took a breath and plowed ahead before I could change my mind. "Are you free tonight? How about that dinner we talked about?"

  'Tonight ... ? Well, actually, I—"

  "It's just that I wanted to talk about a few things related to the show," I said quickly. God forbid that she should think I might be attracted to her.

  "I'd like to, Chris, but I've got a MAC flight to catch at six-thirty."

  "Oh. Well, it's nothing that—"

  "How about now? I haven't been off base all day, and I'd love a good long walk. Are you doing anything this afternoon?"

  Too direct, I suppose. I almost retreated instinctively with a song and dance about having just gotten in, needing to do several things, etc., etc. What I said before about not being fainthearted still holds, but I never said I was terrifically secure, you know. Fortunately, I held firm for once.

  "No, I'm not," I said. "Do you like the zoo?"

  "I love it."

  "Not too cold for you?"

  "Cold? It's beautiful for December. You've lived in the Banana Belt too long. Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes."

  She was dressed in civilian clothes this time; a trendy waist-length winter jacket and slacks, and pleasingly unsensible shoes. She was slighter than I'd realized, narrowly built in the shoulders and upper body, small-breasted and narrow-waisted, but with robust, rounded hips and curvy, athletic legs; something along the lines of a Venus of Lucas Cranach the Elder, but with longer legs. Cranach's Venuses and Lucretias, hot little numbers in their time, had never seemed very alluring to me, but quite suddenly I realized I'd been looking at things all wrong. In fact, I couldn't imagine a more attractive way for a female to be formed. Old Cranach rose considerably in my estimation.