A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  I knew what I was going to do, of course, but how was I going to rationalize it? We ethical people are very fastidious about our rationalizations. It was going to take some thought.

  After leaving Antuono's hodgepodge of an office, I stopped at a coffee bar for a lunch of cheese and tomato panini. Then I went back up to my room in hopes of getting there before the maid did so that I could recover my precipitately discarded codeine capsules. No luck. She had been there and done a thorough job. I took a couple of aspirin and, with a muffled groan or two, lay myself stiffly down on the freshly made bed.

  Twenty minutes later I was roused by a telephone call from the polizia criminale. They understood that I was still recuperating, but would it be too much of an imposition if they came in a car and brought me to police headquarters to verify the transcript of my interview and perhaps look at a few photographs of local criminals? As miserable as I was feeling, it was still far from an imposition. It was, in fact, nice to know somebody cared.

  When I looked at the transcript, I was astonished to find it lucid and complete, with the remarks I made while I was unconscious being, if anything, marginally more coherent than what I said after I woke up. I signed it, then leafed through a few thick loose leaf books of photographs, but was unable to find either of the thugs. The two policemen accepted this fatalistically, then shook my hand with expressions of gratitude. I was courteously taken back to the Hotel Europa, where I went back up to my room to try to sleep again. I napped for almost two hours, and woke up at 3:30, feeling better and worrying about Max. I caught a taxi at the stand in front of the hotel and headed for the hospital, this time without calling first.

  Chapter 7

  Among the many social skills in which I seem to be lacking is the knack of providing cheerful solace at hospital bedsides. My conversational charms atrophy, my sense of humor withers, my smile petrifies. My friend Louis, who experienced this firsthand after his double-hernia operation, has a ready explanation, of course: My relief that it is someone else and not me in the bed creates a powerful sense of guilt, which in turn effects an overcompensatory reaction that sharply suppresses any behavior approximating good cheer.

  Maybe so—who am I to argue with Freud?—but if I felt any relief at seeing Max, then it was deeply suppressed indeed. I had run into Dr. Tolomeo in the hallway outside the room, and he had taken me aside for an ominous warning. "Your friend—It looks worse than it is. Don't be frightened when you see him."

  It was a good thing he told me, because Max was a frightening sight. He was propped into a semi-sitting position by the mechanical bed, with his naked legs straight out in front of him. Instead of the casts I'd expected, there was a horror- movie contraption of bolted-together steel rods encasing each leg from just above the knee almost to the ankle. Heavy steel pins—six on each leg—skewered the limb, piercing it through and cruelly transfixing it between the rods. The flesh was ghastly; purple, red, and black, swollen and split open like a hot dog that had been on the grill too long.

  "Sit down, will you?" he said. "I wouldn't want you to faint on me." He was trying to sound chipper, but his voice was feeble, the words blurry, as if he had something in his mouth. He seemed to have lost thirty pounds. Once-sleek skin sagged clammy and pale beneath his eyes. His mustache had been shaved off to allow for five or six gruesome stitches, and without that imposing landmark his face seemed featureless and indistinct, like an out-of-focus photograph.

  He didn't look remotely like Alfred E. Neuman.

  "I look like hell, don't I?" he said.

  "Not too bad. How do you feel?"

  "You have to be kidding."

  I saw a sluggish movement of tongue where it wasn't supposed to be, and realized that under the wound on his lip some teeth had been knocked out. Why that should have shocked me more than the state of his legs I don't know, but it did. I remembered the mushy sound of that heavy fist hitting him in the face, and I felt a single cold drop of sweat trickle down between my shoulder blades.

  "Do you want me to come back another time, Max?"

  "No, no," he said quickly. "Stay, I'm glad you're here. And I don't really feel too bad. They keep me doped up."

  A good thing, I thought.

  "These things on my legs … They're not as bad as they look. They're supposed to be better than casts for my kind of fractures. They say I'll be able to start walking a little as soon as the swelling goes down and the cuts heal up. Next week, maybe."

  "Really. That's great." I'd believe it when I saw it.

  "Maybe sooner," he said. "They say I'm doing fine. They're amazed, in fact."

  Well, there I was, doing my usual sterling bedside job. Poor Max was working like mad to cheer me up.

  "Glad to hear it," I said heartily, finally sitting down. "Anything I can do for you?"

  "Do? No." He shifted awkwardly on the bed. There were ropes strung from the metal rods on his legs to a simple pipe frame over the bed, keeping his feet a few inches off the mattress, and movement was difficult. At one point he twisted too far and gasped.

  I flinched. "Do you want a nurse?"

  "Uh-uh. Chris ... " He shrugged awkwardly. His mouth moved like an old, old man's as he probed with his tongue in the gap between his teeth. "They told me you came back, that you actually tried to fight off those two goons. I heard you wound up in the hospital yourself."

  "Just for observation. I wasn't hurt." My own pains and aches had shrunk to insignificance the second I'd seen Max.

  "Well, I just wanted to say . . . I just wanted to tell you how much I—"

  "That's okay, pal. You would have done the same for me." "I hope so. I'd like to think so." He dropped his eyes. "I'm not sure, though."

  "Sure you would have. Look, it wasn't anything that extraordinary. There wasn't really time to think about it. Believe me, all I—"

  "Chris," Max said abruptly, "those guys really scared me."

  "Of course they did. You'd have been crazy not to be scared. How do you think I felt?"

  "I mean really scared. I'm still scared."

  "Well, naturally. Anybody—"

  He jerked his head with a listless kind of impatience, finally deciding to come out with what I knew he was driving at. "I'm not going to talk to Colonel Antuono. I can't, Chris. This was just a warning. The next time they'll kill me. I know these people. They're animals."

  "I know, Max, but are you just going to let those bastards—" I clamped my mouth shut. Who the hell was he to be giving lessons in moral duty to him? Nobody had issued a sadistic warning to me. My involvement was circumstantial and temporary, my own fault. And I was doing fine, walking around with a few lingering aches. Max was the one impaled on that orthopedic Iron Maiden, hoping, in Dr. Tolomeo's dark phrase, to adjust.

  "Chris, you ought to be scared, too. You ought to get out of here and go back to Seattle."

  "Me? What do I have to be scared about?"

  "You saw their faces. You could identify them."

  "If they were going to kill me over that, they'd have done it then," I said, none too confidently. If running you down with a car doesn't qualify as attempted murder, what does? "I'm not going anywhere. I have things to talk about with Clara and Amedeo. Then I'm going down and see about that Boursse of Ugo's before he changes his mind Then I'm going home."

  His eyes closed. "I'm too tired to argue with you. I just wish the hell you'd clear out."

  A husky, gray-haired nurse came in with a tray of equipment. "I must examine the insertion sites," she announced brightly in Italian.

  I stood up. "I'll go."

  "No," Max said. "She does this every couple of hours. It just takes a few minutes. Don't go yet." But he looked terribly haggard now, and gray-faced with pain.

  "I don't know ....." I looked at the nurse.

  "It's all right," she said. "He's fine. It isn't as bad as it looks." So everyone kept telling me. "Go outside, and then you can come back in ten minutes."

  "Please," Max said.

  "Sure
," I said. "Of course I will."

  Fifteen minutes later, she emerged, wafted on a pungent billow of antiseptic, and motioned me back in with a tilt of her head. "I gave him something for the pain," she whispered. I returned to find the bed straightened and Max neatened as well, even to having had his hair combed. His face looked tired but no longer drawn with pain; wistful and relaxed. "Hi there, buddy," he said. His hands, which had been gripping the sheets the whole time I'd been there, were loosely clasped on his abdomen.

  "The thing is," he was murmuring pensively, mostly to himself, "the thing is, you don't really mean to stay, not forever."

  The subject had apparently changed.

  "You always mean to go back home someday," he went on dreamily. "And then one day you realize you stayed too long. You go home to America, but it isn't home anymore. You feel like a foreigner. So you run back to Italy, only that's not home either. It doesn't even exist, the Italy you thought you lived in. You made it up. You've never even seen the real Italy, let alone understood it. You've never been anything but a foreigner to them." He shook his head, sadly, slowly. "And they'll never let you be anything else. Can you even understand what I'm talking about?"

  "Sure, I can," I said. "I'm hearing the Expatriate's Lament, as sung by the great Italian tenor Massimiliano Caboto. "

  You have to understand Max. When he was in his cups— or high on painkiller, apparently—he sometimes shifted from his natural ebullience to a tranquil but distinctly theatrical melancholy. Comedy to Tragedy, and often as not on this very subject. I had long ago learned that taking it at face value tended to make him genuinely downhearted, as if he began to believe what he was saying. And this didn't seem like the time to make Max downhearted. He had more than enough to be glum about as it was.

  "You sting me," he said, hamming it up to show me he wasn't taking himself seriously. But a moment later he said: "I'm a man without roots, Chris. I'm alone now, ever since Giulia died. I'm going to die here, 5,000 miles from my native land. They're going to bury me in the corner of the cemetery they save for Englishmen and other crazy people."

  "Max, believe me, you're not going to die," I said. "Dr. Tolomeo—"

  "I don't mean now," he said, lifting an irritable eyebrow. I was spoiling his scene. "I mean eventually."

  I smiled as reassuringly as I could. "You're just feeling down now. It's understandable. You'll be yourself again in a few days."

  "Ah, what the hell," he said wearily. "What do you understand, a kid like you."

  I was having my typical success at jollying the patient up, and I fidgeted in the uncomfortable visitor's chair, wondering if I ought to go before I depressed him even more. I was rescued by the return of the nurse.

  "I think maybe now he should rest."

  I leaped from the chair. "I'll go, then. I'll drop in again in a clay or two, Max."

  "Fine, fine." His eyelids were slipping down. "Chris?" he said as I got to the door.

  "Yes?"

  "When was it we were supposed to go see Ugo?"

  "This weekend. Saturday."

  "Oh." He sighed and settled himself back against the pillows, his eyes closed now. The structure of rods and pins on his legs was like a mechanical monster slowly ingesting him from the bottom up. "Well, I think I'm probably not going to make it."

  By the time I got back downtown I was thoroughly depressed. Seeing Max had taken the spirit out of me, and, added to the morning's frustrating session with Colonel Antuono, it had been a tough day for a body that had not yet entirely composed itself, as Dr. Tolomeo might have said. My mind didn't feel all that composed, either. Too weary to cope with a real dinner, I stopped at a little bar on Via Ugo Bassi for a couple of stale panini with ham and cheese, willingly paying the extra lire charged for sitting down. Then I went up to my room in the Europa to make another early night of it.

  I was starting to feel guilty, too. Here I was, concluding my third day in Bologna on a generous expense account, and what had I done to earn my keep so far? Not a thing. I grant you, it wasn't my fault, and it had hardly been what I'd call a pleasure trip. All the same, I hadn't gotten anything done and I was beginning to get fidgety. Achy joints or not, there was a major show to be organized. I picked up the telephone. No doubt Louis would have chirped gravely (yes, Louis can chirp gravely) about obsessive-compulsive work behavior, but Louis wasn't there to know. I telephoned Clara Gozzi, who would be contributing several pictures to the Northerners in Italy show, and made an appointment to visit her in Ferrara the next morning to discuss the arrangements.

  My sense of responsibility pacified, I was virtuously, dreamlessly asleep by eight o'clock.

  Chapter 8

  It was half an hour to Ferrara by rail, over restful green countryside dotted with farms. The 10:00 A.M. train was clean and smooth-running, with good caffè latte available from a cart and big windows that let in the warm morning sunlight. I soaked up both gratefully and arrived relaxed and feeling almost whole again. My appointment was still forty minutes off, so I took a slow, lulling, roundabout walk to Clara's house. Lulling was just what I needed, and Ferrara was the right place for it, a sober Renaissance city of gardens, broad boulevards, and gracefully crumbling palaces, all of it bathed in the sweet, melancholy sheen of decaying grandeur.

  Clara Gozzi, who was rich enough to live anywhere she liked, had chosen not to reside on the elegant, palazzo-lined Corso Ercole d'Este with the rest of the gentry. "Who wants to live in a damned mausoleum?" she'd grumbled when I'd asked her about it on an earlier visit. "Besides, half those monstrosities are let out to technical institutes and government offices. Would you like to live next door to the traffic police?"

  Instead, she had a house on the southern outskirts of the city; in a tree-lined, middle-class neighborhood picked because she thought it looked like Aix-en-Provence (it did), where she'd spent her summers as a girl. Here, there were solid blocks of modern, four-story apartment houses built in a not-displeasing neo-Venetian Gothic style, with modest loggias, balconies, and central patios. Clara had bought an entire four-family building, left the outside as it was, and had the inside redone to her specifications. Beyond installing an elevator, a track-lighting system to spotlight her collection, and a bank of security systems, there wasn't much to the redoing. Like many serious collectors, she made only one demand of interior decoration: that it not compete with what hung on the walls. The linoleum-tile floors had been replaced with oak; other than that, the inside of the house still looked like the four separate, identical apartments it had been before, and the furniture, if not quite shabby, was surely nondescript. She had, as a matter of fact, simply had her agent buy most of it from the departing tenants; less fuss that way.

  Clara Gozzi had come into the world rich by birth, had been made considerably poorer by a short, disastrous marriage in the 1950s to a dashing, self-styled Luxembourgian count (subsequently done in by wife number three), and had recouped her original wealth and more by her hardheaded management of the Gozzi interests in publishing, kitchenware, and sporting equipment. She was richer even than Ugo Scoccimarro and, like him, scorned the pretensions and niceties of refined social behavior. But whereas Ugo did it from motives of pride and stiff-necked insecurity, Clara did it without giving it a thought. In other ways, she was altogether unlike Ugo: imperious, supercilious, peremptory in her dealings with others.

  But underneath this spiky exterior there was—well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it a heart of gold, but certainly a strongly developed philanthropy. Clara was one of those people who had no use and little patience for other human beings as individuals, but who gave handsomely to charitable causes. Knock on her door and ask for a handout to buy your first meal in three days and you were out of luck; write her a letter and ask for $10,000 dollars for an international feed-the-hungry plan and you'd probably get it.

  Most people thought of her as an essentially misanthropic woman burdened with a grudging and high-handed sense of noblesse oblige. I saw her differently: as a p
hysically ill- favored woman who'd been taken advantage of in an early marriage (she'd been seventeen) and had thereafter erected a thorny, unscalable facade to protect herself. After a while she'd probably come to enjoy playing the Tartar, and she was rich and influential enough to get away with it.

  I liked her. Naturally. More or less. And I was pretty sure she liked me. The one usually goes along with the other. In my dealings with her I'd found her to be intelligent, forthright, and without artifice; she knew what she wanted, what she said was exactly what she meant, and her mind was unlikely to change. In the flighty, volatile art world, traits like those made up for a lot of personality flaws.

  It was signora Gozzi, you may remember, who had lost several paintings to thieves the same night the Pinacoteca was 'woken into two years earlier. Six had been taken from her home, and one—the Rubens that had eventually wound up in Blusher's warehouse and was now on its way back to her—had been stolen from Max's workshop. I had been in touch with her on the telephone about the Rubens several times in the last ten days, but we had yet to discuss the specifics involved in her loan of four other paintings to the exhibition.

  Often these specifics are the trickiest part of putting together a show. Understandably enough, lenders can get picky about the security and transportation of their treasures. Some insist that paintings be hand-carried in airplanes, rather than crated up and shipped as baggage. This usually means a separate trip for every piece, with two seats paid for each time; one for you and one for the painting. First class, of course; Titians and Holbeins don't travel economy class. Sometimes lenders demand extra insurance coverage. Sometimes they come up with finicky sets of demands that seem, to a curator at any rate, designed to make life difficult: This particular painting may be reproduced in the catalogue, but not on postcards; that particular painting may be shown in Cleveland and Chicago, but not in Baltimore. You just never know.