A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery)

by Aaron Elkins

  "Nope, just you, buddy."

  "Look—would you mind sitting down? You're making me nervous." The jokey good humor was wearing thin. He was no longer smiling. The cigar lay in its saucer.

  "I'll stand. I'm not staying long."

  "Fine, suit yourself. Okay, let's say for the sake of argument I could have done it. What would be the point? What would I want with the back of an old panel?"

  "You could forge a Terbrugghen on it and then you and Mike Blusher could use it in a swindle."

  "The guy with the Rubens? I don't even know him."

  I shook my head. "You're slipping. You told me you'd done business with him."

  "I said—? "

  "At dinner last week with Amedeo and Benedetto." Another fragment that had meant nothing at the time.

  Max frowned, licked his lips, made a partial recovery. "Oh—well–business with him, sure, but I don't know him. I mean—"

  "Max, there's no point in this. I'm going now."

  "Chris, wait—"

  I hesitated. There were loose ends. If he wanted to talk, I would stay a while longer.

  "Let me ask you this," he said. "Can you really believe I'd try to kill you over something like this? To cover up some stupid little swindle?"

  "It's pretty hard to believe, all right."

  "Well, there you are."

  "But I believe you'd kill me to cover up a murder."

  "A mur—"

  "You're the one who stole Clara's Rubens." It occurred to me that I was beginning to enjoy this. One more thing never to tell Louis.

  "What? Out of my own shop? Jesus Christ, who's the one on the pills, you or me?"

  "Your watchman caught you and you wound up killing him. Right?"

  "I don't believe I'm hearing this. I mean, Giampietro, he was an old friend."

  "So was I an old friend."

  He swallowed and raised his hands, palms out; a placating gesture. "Chris, do me a favor and give this some thought before you do anything stupid. You know this doesn't add up."

  "Oh, it adds up. Amedeo told me he called you right after the Pinacoteca break-in. He wanted to warn you there might be more thefts. It took me a long time to see what that meant."

  He tried to laugh, not successfully. "All right, don't keep me in suspense. What does it mean?"

  "It gave you a chance to jump on the bandwagon. You hopped out of bed, went downtown, and took Clara's painting from your own shop, figuring everybody would assume the same gang was involved. Which is exactly what everybody did."

  I took a deep breath. I was positive I was right, but all the same I was somewhat in advance of the available facts here. And I wanted to get more information from him, not give it to him. "That list of names you had was just so much camouflage, wasn't it?"

  "The hell it was," he said hotly. "Amedeo was on it, the two guys who installed the security system were on it—"

  "I'm not saying you couldn't name five people, Max. I'm saying it was a smoke screen all the same."

  "Smoke screen!" He gestured angrily at his legs. "You think those bastards did this to me because of some stupid smoke screen?"

  I didn't have an answer for that yet.

  My silence encouraged him. He pushed the bed tray roughly aside. The saucer clattered to the floor with the cigar. Ashes mingled with orange juice. "This gets nuttier by the second. First you walk in here and tell me I tried to kill you. Five minutes later you tell me I screwed around with one of Ugo's paintings and then forged this Terborch—"

  "Terbrugghen, Max," I said. "Terbrugghen."

  He shook his head impatiently. "Terborch, Terbrugghen. Then I'm supposed to be in some kind of scam with Mike Blusher, for God's sake. Five minutes after that you tell me I robbed a painting in my own shop and killed an old man who was like a father to me."

  He licked his lips again and pulled himself a little higher on the bed. "Look, you said—I think you said—I tried to kill you to keep you from finding out about Ugo's picture. Only you also said the real reason was to keep you from finding out I stole the Rubens and killed Giampietro. Well, which is it? Am I missing something, or what? Is there supposed to be some connection there?"

  "I don't know the connection yet," I said.

  "Well, what do you know, for Christ's sake?" he asked, spilling over with righteous anger of his own. "That Amedeo called me to tell me about the break-in? He called every goddamn gallery-owner in Bologna! What the hell are you picking on me for?"

  But I'd thought that through before I'd come. Sure, a lot of people could have piggybacked on the museum robbery and stolen the Rubens. For that matter, a lot of other people had access to Ugo's Uytewael before it was shipped to Sicily. And sure, Max wasn't the only person in Italy who knew Mike Blusher. And true, there were even other people—not very many, though—with the skill to forge the Terbrugghen, the van Eyck, the panel itself.

  But who else was there to whom all these things applied? No one; only Max.

  "Look, you're not seeing this right," he said when I ticked these points off to him. "Why—"

  "Added to which, your ears almost fell off when I walked in here. That was enough all by itself."

  He opened his mouth to argue some more, but gave up at last, sinking back against the pillows. "All right, Chris. What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to call Antuono. So long, Max." I headed for the door.

  "Chris, wait."

  I stopped.

  "We go back a long way, Chris."

  I said nothing. I preferred not to think about that.

  "You have to believe I never wanted to hurt you," he said. "I tried like hell to keep you from going to Sicily, remember that? But you just wouldn't listen. . . . I just didn't know what else to do." His eyes gleamed. "I swear to God, Chris— I told him I didn't want you killed, not even hurt."

  "Who'd you get to do it?" I asked. "Who put the bomb in my bag?"

  He gave me a wry smile. "Bologna's like anyplace else. If you have the money and you know the right people, you can get anything done."

  "Well, you sure seem to know the right people, Max."

  "But the thing I want you to know—the important thing–is that I just wanted you scared off, just a loud noise, basically. At least tell me you believe that."

  "I don't." I started for the door again.

  "Wait—will you at least let me explain? Then go ahead and do whatever you think is right. I won't try to stop you."

  I hung back.

  "Come on, Chris, what is there to lose? I won't lie to you, I promise."

  "All right, Max." But first I pulled the door open. I had seen too many movies, read too many books, where someone confronts the villain, announces that he is on his way to the police, and then hangs around to chat, with uniformly unfortunate results. I couldn't imagine Max doing me any harm in the condition he was in, but I was taking no chances.

  "Sit down, will you?" he said. "I don't want to talk up at you."

  I sat a good six feet away from him. "Go ahead."

  It was a rambling, teary, self-justifying story that took almost half an hour. His difficulties had begun, he said, when his wife developed ovarian cancer. Bills had piled up, first from unsuccessful medical treatments, then from prodigiously expensive alternative therapies. In a year he was $150,000 in debt. His business was on the edge of failure, the creditors already squabbling over the proceeds. And more money was needed for a new course of ozone therapy and immunostimulants in Venezuela.

  Then had come Amedeo Di Vecchio's lifesaving call in the middle of the night. There were art thieves afoot! Who knew who their next victim might be? As I'd surmised, Max had jumped at the unexpected chance, making off with Clara's Rubens and killing—accidentally killing, he said— the old watchman who'd come upon him in the act. Nine days later, while he was still trying to find a receiver for the picture, Giulia died. His crushing need for money abated. The painting was put in a bank vault in Genoa while he thought about what to do with it.

 
Max had a problem. Not the police, but the Mafia. They found it not at all amusing that someone had horned in on their meticulously executed robberies, to make a clumsy and amateurish heist of his own. They didn't like being exploited, and they'd let it be known that whoever was responsible might surely expect a word or two of reproach from them. When they found him.

  So Max sat nervously on his secret for over a year, and then another opportunity presented itself, a way out. Ugo Scoccimarro, moving back to Sicily from Milan, asked Max to oversee the shipping of his collection to his new home. Among the paintings was one that Ugo himself had never seen: a Joachim Uytewael that Clara Gozzi had bought for him in London and that was now at the Pinacoteca being authenticated. As Ugo's agent, Max had no difficulty in picking up the picture at the museum for hand delivery to the Milanese shippers.

  But he did it by way of a two-day stop at his workshop, where he cut the face of the painting from the panel. The sawed-off back was replaced with a copy, the exposed edges were hidden with a thick layer of bogus cañamograss, and the piece was reframed. If there were differences from the original, as no doubt there were, Ugo would never notice. How could he? He'd never seen the original. The Uytewael was then shipped off to Sicily with the rest of the collection, while the multitalented Max used the old panel itself as the base for a painstakingly forged Terbrugghen Lute Player. The "van Eyck" that he then painted over it was an added subtlety.

  "What's all this got to do with the Rubens?" I asked.

  "Everything." I had the impression he was disappointed in me for not having seen it for myself. "It was my way of getting rid of that damn Rubens without the Mafia finding out I had anything to do with it. I got it into one of Salvatorelli's shipments to Blusher, along with the fake Terbrugghen—"

  "So Salvatorelli was part of this, too?"

  Max shook his head. "I do a lot of business with them, I'm always around the warehouse. It was nothing to slip the pictures into one of those big shipments to Seattle. And I figured Seattle was far enough away so the Mafia'd never connect me with it when the picture turned up."

  "But they did."

  His hand went to his knees. "Yeah."

  "I don't get it, Max. What was the point? You never tried to collect any money on the Rubens. Blusher donated it to the museum."

  "Ah, that was the beauty part," he said with every appearance of pride.

  He'd given up the idea of getting money for the Rubens almost from the start. Selling it to a crooked receiver or turning it in for the insurance reward, even through a third party, would very likely have led the Mafia to him, a prospect he didn't care to think about.

  So he had conceived the idea of using it, through Blusher, as a come-on. Its appearance in the Seattle warehouse would create plenty of preliminary media attention. Then, when the reward was later donated to the museum, there would be even more, and any lingering skepticism about Blusher's motives and honesty would vanish. This would be especially helpful when the second unexplained item in the shipment, an ostensibly "genuine" Terbrugghen under it.

  "And that's the story," Max said. "I won't go into the sordid business details."

  He didn't have to. It was an old scam. The newly famous, long-lost Terbrugghen could now be sold to a wide-eyed collector who had heard and read all about it. Making a few extra copies of the painting (something Max had neglected to mention) and also selling them as the original was nothing new, either. The trick was to make sure the buyers were: (a) naive; (b) out of the international art mainstream; and (c) from widely separated parts of the world—say, Oman, South Korea, and Uruguay.

  If Max and Blusher managed to sell all four copies at roughly $400,000 each, the total would come to $1,600,000, against which the donation of the Rubens reward was no more than a modest investment. But of course Blusher had been too eager, too obvious, too out-and-out dumb, Max didn't know that part of it yet, but I thought I'd leave it to someone else to tell him.

  "And now," he said wistfully, "I've got what I deserve, Chris. I'm a cripple for life. I'm still $100,000 in debt. I'll never have a single day free from pain. And most terrible of all, Chris"—his voice trembled, cracked; the implication was of feelings too profound for speech—"most terrible of all, I have to live with Giampietro's death . . . and what I almost did to you."

  He dropped his chin to his chest and spoke in a monotone. "Isn't that punishment enough, Chris?"

  I sighed and stood up.

  His head lifted. "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to call Colonel Antuono," I said.

  Chapter 21

  I would have, too, but as I walked through the lobby of the hotel on my way up to our room, one of the morning-coated men behind it answered a telephone and signaled me with a raised forefinger.

  "For you, dottore. He says important." The forefinger described an elegant arc, directing me to a house telephone where I could take the call.

  "Do you want to recover the paintings?" was the startling greeting. The words were in Italian, rushed and indistinct, tumbling frantically over each other. This, I thought, was the "somewhat agitated gentleman" who had tried to reach me earlier.

  I suppose I ought to say that I responded with a thrill of excitement and anticipation, but the truth is, I was annoyed. I wanted to go upstairs and tell Anne about Max. I wanted to call Antuono. Then I wanted to get on the train and go to Lake Maggiore with Anne. I didn't want to talk to some raving Italian about some harebrained scheme to get back the stolen paintings.

  "What paintings?" I said querulously. "Who is this?"

  "What paintings? Do you think I'm playing a game with you? Are you testing how far you can go? I'm telling you, I'll destroy them!"

  His voice was unsettling. He seemed to be shouting, but muffling the sound with a cloth over the mouthpiece. The result was a disembodied croak, a breathless, disturbing combination of bellicosity and trepidation. The skin on the back of my neck prickled. Was it conceivable he actually had the paintings?

  "Now look," I said, trying to sound reasonable, reassuring, "if you really have the paintings, there's no need—"

  "Shut up. Leave the hotel. Walk quickly to the corner of Via Nazario, by the back of the fruit market. Wait there. Do it at once. Hang up and go outside."

  "Wait, I don't know where it is—"

  "Outside, then to your left one block. There won't be another chance, you understand?"

  "All right, give me five minutes. I have to—"

  "You think I'm insane? No. No telephone calls to your carabinieri friends, no running upstairs to your girlfriend. I warn you—"

  He knew about Antuono, about Anne. That meant he knew me. He was disguising his voice. That meant I knew him. I searched in my pocket for a pen and tried to catch the attention of the man behind the desk. If I could scribble a note to Anne—

  "Stop!" the voice yawped in my ear. "I can see you."

  I stopped dead. I was standing in a glassed-in vestibule at the entrance to the lobby, separated from Via Montegrappa by a row of four clear-glass doors. Across the narrow street was a row of three-story buildings with shops on the ground floor and shuttered windows above. I scanned the upper stories without being able to see anything. Was he really watching me? The situation's comic-opera aspects, marked until then, vanished. A lone shiver crawled down the center of my back. I had the unpleasant feeling that things were about to get away from me; had already gotten away from me.

  "Oh, yes," he said triumphantly, "that's right, I can see. I have binoculars. Put your pen back in your pocket." When I did, he said: "There, that's better," and laughed, but there were brittle shards of panic in it. "I've had enough," he told me. "This is it, things are getting too difficult for me. I warn you, I'll burn them!" Possibly he was faking, trying to make me believe he was on the edge of hysteria. If so, he was doing a good job.

  "It's too risky," he babbled on. "It's not worth it. If you don't want to do it, fine, excellent, to hell with them. I'll just—'

  "All rig
ht, take it easy. But what do you have in mind? You have to tell me—"

  "I have to tell you nothing! I'm finished arguing with you! Go now, this instant, otherwise it's all off. I mean what I say. The pictures are on your conscience!" And the connection was broken.

  "Wait!" I said. "Are you there?" I jiggled the telephone. "Hello?"

  I was stalling, of course, trying to buy time for thought, but there was only a rush of questions, jumbled and chaotic. Did this lunatic really have the paintings? What was it he wanted me to do? And why me? And was it really someone I knew? Croce? Salvatorelli? Di Vecchio, even, or Benedetto Luca? Surely not Ugo? Clara?

  And of course the critical question: Was the object not restitution but something else? Max had tried to kill me once. Was this another attempt, before I got to Antuono? No, impossible. I'd left him a mere ten minutes before; besides, how could he know I'd go to the hotel and not to Antuono's office? Someone else, then? Had I made it onto the Mafia's hit list, too? If so, what better way to lure me than to tell me that the retrieval—in fact the continued existence—of a Bellini, a Perugino, a Giorgione, a Correggio . . . all depended on my cooperation?

  But by the time I replaced the receiver, I'd made up my mind to go. I pushed out through the doors and turned left, as directed. I'd like to say that I was being courageous, but the truth is that I wasn't being anything. I didn't make a conscious choice, I just started walking. I couldn't think of anything else to do.

  The Mercato Ugo Bassi was a vast farmers' market under a single roof. Walking to Via Nazario took me to the alley at the rear of it, where the delivery dock was. The back of an Italian farmers' market isn't much different from the back of an American one, except that the cheeses smell better, or at least riper. There were sweating men unloading vegetables from decrepit trucks; piles of empty crates; lettuce leaves and spoiled fruit on the ground; puddles of rancid water everywhere. The day was overcast and muggy, the fresh smells slightly tainted with rot.

  I stood in the center of the alley where I could be seen easily, and in a few seconds a small blue car—hadn't I seen it somewhere before?—threaded its slow way through the trucks and workmen, and stopped in front of me, leaving its engine running. The door was pushed open. I got in. The one coherent thought I remember having was: If I get killed, how is Anne ever going to find out what happened to me?