A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  Which shows you what can happen when you're dumb enough to leave your beautiful wife home alone while you spend your weekends blissfully buried in the fifteenth century. Oh, later on, when I thought about it, I could see that we'd been drifting apart a little over the previous year or so, but the truth is, at the time, I just didn't have a clue.

  The long divorce negotiations, miserable as they were, at least had the virtue of killing the feelings I still had for Bev. But they went on so long, and I got so tired of our carping at each other through our lawyers, and niggling over every piece of furniture, every book, every tape, that in the end I gave almost everything to her, and was relieved to be done with it. The only thing that was important to me that I wound up keeping was our dog, Murphy, which, in effect, I traded for our new $8,000 car.

  Impossible, you think? I'm exaggerating, you say? The system doesn't work that way? Well, think twice before you get divorced is all I can say.

  The worst of it was, Murph got killed by a car a month later, so I came out of it with nothing at all that was worth anything.

  And I loved that damn dog.

  Now, while all this was going on, I took on a temporary European assignment, working with the Department of Defense to help put together a traveling exhibition of Old Masters paintings that had been looted by the Nazis in World War II, and later recovered for their owners by the American military. Anne Greene was an Air Force captain, a community liaison officer, assigned to the exhibition, to do whatever community liaison officers do. We met at the U.S. Air Force installation in Berlin, where the show was administratively headquartered.

  This was fourteen months after Bev had left; fourteen months during which I'd been jokingly reintroduced to a singles scene that had changed so much I never did get my bearings in it—or wanted to get them, for that matter. At thirty-four I felt like a dinosaur from another planet, let alone another era. I even started to think that maybe I didn't like women anymore; modern women anyway. Anne changed that. Intelligent, self-sufficient, career-oriented, she was as modern as they come, yet I loved being with her, being anywhere near her. I started thinking that maybe I was healing, becoming whole again. I started thinking that maybe I loved her.

  My European assignment lasted six weeks. Then I had to go back to San Francisco to resume my regular job at the museum. Anne and I stayed in touch, of course, and when the final divorce proceedings came up, she offered to take a week's vacation to be with me during what she figured would be a rocky time. I told her it wasn't going to be rocky at all— in my own mind it was already over and done—but it would be wonderful to see her. And when the whole business was finished, I would show her San Francisco. If she could afford to take two weeks, I'd show her the whole West Coast.

  It turned out to be a mistake. I just wasn't able to keep my two worlds straight. The court appearances were bad enough, but I was ready for them. What I wasn't ready for were the out-of-court negotiating sessions in which Bev and I bitterly carved up and appropriated the rubble from a decade's shared history while our lawyers nodded sagely and dispassionately to each other: "That seems fair to me, Bernie, what do you think?" "Oh, I think we can live with that, Rita. We're not trying to be vengeful here."

  Like hell we weren't. One thing you learn in a divorce is that you have reserves of vengefulness you never dreamed were there.

  It had been far worse than I'd expected. In the afternoons I would slouch home to a waiting Anne, drained and dispirited, sullen and combative. And unable to make love.

  Which, on top of everything else, made me defensive and quick to take offense. At one point, following a particularly humiliating nonperformance in bed, I remember ranting and going around kicking chairs and wallowing in noisy self- recrimination. Anne, after four or five days of unbelievable tolerance, finally blew up.

  "Goddammit!" she yelled, suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed, "I didn't come 6,000 miles to get laid, so just shut up, will you!"

  It was so unlike her, it stunned me into silence.

  "You jerk!" she added after a moment, and whacked me with a pillow. It was the sort of thing that should have ended in teary laughter, but it turned into an ugly, heart-searing fight instead. Early the next morning, after lying all night with our backs turned stiffly to each other, we patched it up. But not really, not satisfactorily. It was never the way it had been before. Anne stayed another two gingerly days, then told me she really had to get back to her job in Germany. My heart was like lead, but I didn't argue. And so she left, looking tense and pale. God knows what I looked like.

  In her place I would have left, too, only sooner. She had come to offer comfort, and I wasn't having any. I just wasn't ready for it.

  That had been five months ago. Since then we'd exchanged two or three guarded letters. I didn't know if she was seeing anyone else, and she didn't know if I was. (I wasn't; the divorce, and then the miserable hassling with Anne had scraped me raw, worn me down. I gave it a try, but I just couldn't face the modern pre-mating ritual, not yet.) I'd wanted to call her a hundred times, but never got myself to do it. The thing was, I felt like such a twit. What would I say? Apologize? I'd already done that. So, afraid to bring things to a head, I had let them drift unresolved. In five months we hadn't spoken to each other.

  And then this call. "No message. Just called to say hi." Surely it was time to see if we could work things through, and here was Anne—blameless, openhearted Anne—making the first move. And here was I, in Europe—as Debbie had probably told her—only a few hundred miles away from her base at Berchtesgaden. All I had to do was call her, tell her where I was, arrange to meet .. .

  I looked at the telephone a long time, unmoving. After a while I undressed and went to bed.

  Chapter 10

  Trasporti Salvatorelli was located on the city's western outskirts, beyond the Florence-bound railroad tracks, in the Ouartiere Mazzini. It was one of several low buildings in a sterile, modern industrial park near the intersection of Viale Vladimir Ilic Lenin and Via Carlo Marx. And for that matter, not all that far from Via Stalingrado and Via Yuri Gagarin. As I mentioned earlier, despite its overlay of luxury hotels, great restaurants, and glittering boutiques, Bologna was not exactly a hotbed of capitalist ideology. To give credit where due, however, you couldn't really accuse it of being parochial, either, at least when it came to names. Not far from where I stood Viale Lenin crossed underneath Tangenziale JFK. There was a Piazza Franklin Delano Roosevelt too, and a Via Abramo Lincoln. No Via Adam Smith, however, and as far as I knew no Piazza Ronald Reagan was being contemplated.

  You may be wondering, with some justification, what I was doing at Trasporti Salvatorelli. That is, why were we entrusting Northerners in Italy to a firm that had proven itself inept at best (the accidental shipment of Clara's Rubens), or "bent" at worst (Paolo's assassination and presumed connections with the underworld)? The answer is that we had no choice. Their unsettling recent history aside, they were simply the best there was in Bologna, and the most experienced by far; not only when it came to the handling, crating, and shipping of valuable artwork—which is a demanding field in itself, and one requiring considerable expertise—but in coping with the Byzantine complexities of getting anything officially deemed an art treasure out of Italy, even temporarily and for the most virtuous of purposes.

  The Pinacoteca had been using them satisfactorily for years. The nearest shipper of comparable reputation was in Milan, but to use them we would have had to ship the paintings to Milan in the first place, which would have put us back where we started. So we were stuck with Trasporti Salvatorelli. Not that I'd given them much thought until the last hectic week or so. Several months ago Benedetto Luca had volunteered the service of Ofelia Nervi, one of his deputies, to make the necessary arrangements with Salvatorelli. This was fine with me. Having someone on the spot was more efficient than my trying to conduct business from Seattle. Instead, I had simply chatted every couple of weeks with Ofelia to head off any potential problems, few of which h
ad arisen. As far as I knew, everything was in order.

  Still, I had to visit Trasporti Salvatorelli myself. For one thing, I was nominally responsible for the whole affair, so I had to sign the ton or so of paperwork that had no doubt accumulated by now. Besides, by this time I'd gotten more than a little uneasy about the firm. I wanted to see the place, get some idea of how it was run, meet Bruno Salvatorelli himself. So at ten o'clock on Friday morning I found myself stepping out of a taxi in front of a long, gray, windowless building, featureless except for an unobtrusive sign over the entrance: "Trasporti Salvatorelli. Per tutte le destinazioni. "

  Inside, the front part of the building was walled off from the operating area by moveable, six-foot-high partitions. Here there was a tiny reception area staffed by a short-skirted, bouncy woman of perhaps twenty-five; a conference room with massive flow charts and schedules pinned to the walls; and a small private office. Everything was modem and well- maintained, but utilitarian in the extreme. No pictures on the walls, no flowers on the desks. The only object there for its cosmetic value was a lonely, failing rubber plant in a corner near the copier. And possibly the receptionist. From beyond the far partition came the thumping, creaking, and cursing to be expected in a busy shipping firm. I was cheered.

  The conference room was occupied by three shirtsleeved men engaged in heated conversation, all more or less at the same time. The portly gentleman in the tie, the receptionist informed me, was signor Salvatorelli, who was expecting me. However, a scheduling crisis had unexpectedly arisen. Something about the way she said it told me that they were not unusual at Trasporti Salvatorelli. The signore would be only a few minutes, she was sure, but if I wished, she would interrupt him. No, I told her, I would be happy to wait. I accepted a cup of tea and took a seat in one of the two visitors' chairs, where I could watch Bruno Salvatorelli in action.

  He was a complete surprise, totally unlike what I'd expected. I know—I shouldn't have been so astonished only a few days after having had a similar experience with Colonel Antuono, but as a matter of fact this happens to me all the time. The thing is, not only do I have this gift for coming up with stereotypes at a moment's notice, but I always seem to do it along embarrassingly hackneyed lines. So what I'd conjured up for Bruno Salvatorelli was a swarthy, furtive, shifty-eyed shyster with glossy black hair; someone who went around shooting his cuffs, or shrugging his skinny shoulders while saying "Eh!"

  To my relief I couldn't have been further off the mark. Not that Bruno Salvatorelli was a reassuring sight. Fat, rumpled, excited, he looked like a man well on the way to an ulcer if not already there. Bald except for an ear-level fringe, he had meticulously teased a few long, shellacked strands of graying hair from one side to the other over the top of his scalp and somehow plastered them in place. At least half a dozen pens were stuffed into a shirt pocket already stained beyond hope of restoration. Stubby, similarly stained fingers held yet another pen, a thick green one, which he jabbed intermittently at one of the flow charts.

  His two foremen held clipboards packed with papers, and while Salvatorelli ranted and poked at the chart, they ranted back and slapped their clipboards. Impossible!" one or the other of them would say every few seconds and turn away in exasperation, but Salvatorelli held firm and eventually prevailed He was obviously the boss; I had to say that for him.

  When his employees had marched grimly out, dominated if not won over heart and soul, Salvatorelli came to shake hands with me. With his other hand he dabbed at his head with a grubby handkerchief, taking care to avoid displacing a single, lovingly arranged strand.

  "This is a terrible business to be in," was his greeting to me in Italian. "Don't ever take up the shipping business. It's one problem after another."

  I promised him I wouldn't and followed him into his office, where he waved me into a chair and, with a great sigh, plumped heavily down behind his desk. For a few seconds he sat there, grimacing and digging his middle finger into a spot at the base of his sternum. If not ulcers, he certainly suffered from heartburn. "I have to stop drinking wine," he told me. "My liver, it can't handle it anymore. It's all right if we speak Italian?"

  In my best accent I told him I was reasonably fluent.

  My best accent isn't all that good. "I'll talk slowly," he said.

  The receptionist came in with two thick folders of papers. Salvatorelli looked at them the way a treed coon looks at the frothing hounds. He practically cowered.

  "What is that?" he asked her, his voice rising.

  Here, I saw, was a harried man, a man who felt himself beset on every side, who wondered when, not if, the next disaster would strike. Every now and then my life gets like that, too, but with Salvatorelli I had the impression it was business as usual.

  "It's only the papers to do with signor Norgren," she told him soothingly. "You told me to bring them."

  "Yes, of course. Good." He winced slightly. "There's nothing wrong with them?"

  "No, everything is in order."

  "Fine, fine, put them down."

  Oddly enough, his nervousness wasn't worrying me; if anything, I was encouraged. It wasn't a suspicious sort of agitation, if that makes any sense; not the skulking fear of a thief, or the terror of a crook in trouble with the Mafia. It just seemed like the sincere concern of a respectable, if frenetic, businessman who took his business to heart.

  This was borne out by the fastidious way he went through the arrangements with me, making sure that I was aware of and approved everything that had been agreed upon between him and Ofelia Nervi, and that I understood the purpose of every form in the files. It took an hour and a half, and although I can't say it was fun, it was comforting. Bruno Salvatorelli knew his stuff.

  Which made the mix-up with Clara Gozzi's Rubens all the more puzzling. How could it possibly have been sent accidentally to Blusher as part of a shipment of otherwise unadulterated junk? What was it doing at Trasporti Salvatorelli in the first place, without Salvatorelli's being aware of it? Or was it a scam of some kind, as I'd surmised with Clara? But that seemed improbable. Bruno Salvatorelli just didn't come across as a crook. Not that my judgment in these matters was perfect.

  "I understand there is also a gentleman in Sicily who is contributing paintings," he said. "Did you wish us to handle them? I have an agent in Palermo."

  "No, I think Ugo's arranging that himself, but I'll be flying down to see him Saturday, before I head back home, and I'll ask him. Signor Salvatorelli, may I ask you a question?"

  "Ask, ask." He was expensive now, replete with the satisfaction of minutiae properly executed. The last document had been signed, we had shaken hands once more, and the receptionist had come in to take away the papers and bring us pungent cups of caffè alla Borgia. (Salvatorelli's liver was apparently selective: wine, no; apricot brandy, yes.)

  "As you may know," I said, "I'm the one who identified the painting in signor Blusher's warehouse as—"

  He stiffened. The anxiety-antennae popped back out on his forehead and quivered. "This is intolerable!" he said. "Intolerable!"

  I backpedaled. "It's only that I couldn't help wondering, signore, how such an accident could happen in so—so well-run a company, so—"

  He wasn't fooled by this mealy-mouthing. The cup was banged into its saucer. Brandy-laced espresso sloshed onto the desk blotter. "I have spoken freely to the police!" he shouted. "I have spoken freely to the insurance company! I have welcomed their investigations! I have embraced their investigations! They ascribe no blame to me! I know nothing of stolen paintings! I will not permit—will not permit—"

  A commotion at the entrance to the building had thrown him off the track. He half rose to peer over my shoulder. "What, what, what. . . ?"

  I turned too, looking out through the space between the partitions. The receptionist was unsuccessfully trying to hold off five uniformed men, two in the military-style khaki outfits of the carabinieri, three in the natty uniforms of the municipal police: dark blue berets and jackets, gray pants with thi
n red stripes, and white Sam Browne belts with handcuffs and holstered pistols. One of the carabinieri carried a semiautomatic machine gun propped barrel-up against his shoulder.

  With an effort Salvatorelli finally managed to get something out. "What do you want?"

  "Signor Salvatorelli?" said one of the policemen, sweeping the complaining receptionist casually aside.

  "Of course I'm signor Salvatorelli. Who else would I be?"

  "I am Captain Barbaccia." He held up a sheet of paper. "I have authorization from the special prosecutor's office to make a search of this property."

  Salvatorelli's cheeks puffed out. Red spots appeared on the sides of his neck. He raised a fat, clenched, quivering hand. "Puh . . ." he said, ". . puh ... "

  Captain Barbaccia took advantage of this interlude in the conversation to step into the office. He looked down at me thoughtfully, a craggy handsome man with an air of quiet authority, and a uniform that must have been tailored for him. Now here was someone who would have made a respectable Eagle of Lombardy.

  "And who are you, please, signore?" he asked me pleasantly.

  I told him.

  And your business here?"

  But by this time Salvatorelli had found speech. "This is too much!" he cried. "I am being persecuted, hounded to death, as was my sainted brother! What do you want here? What do you hope to find? How can I run a business if—"

  "We believe there may be several missing works of art on your property, signore," Barbaccia said calmly.

  Salvatorelli's mouth fell open. His face went from dull red to sick gray. He sagged back into his chair. "You . . . you accuse me?"