A Glancing Light

Chapter 17

La Vecchia Cucina was a homey, rustic place—floors and beamed ceiling of dark wood, walls of rough, whitewashed stucco, a stone fireplace—given a touch of elegance by black-tied waiters and thick white linen. Ugo, ever sensitive to social nuances, basked in being fawningly received as a man of importance, and grandly introduced me to Fabrizio, the proprietor, as a great art scholar from America.

We were shown to a prominent table by Fabrizio himself, who pulled out Mary's chair for her and raised a scandalized fuss when he discovered a faded wine stain at the edge of the snowy tablecloth. The maitre d' was summoned and castigated. Two waiters rushed up. One whisked the offending cloth away; the other slung a new one onto the table with the deft, snapping flick of the wrists that is practically an art form among Italian waiters. Places were rapidly reset while Fabrizio murmured apologies for the inconvenience.

Ugo lapped it all up, dismissed Fabrizio with a forgiving, seigneurial wave of the hand. Glasses of the infamous Jazz! were brought to us. Ugo toasted my health, downed the aperitif with every sign of genuine pleasure, smacked his lips and said "Ah!"

I steeled myself, tossed the stuff back, smacked my lips, and said "Ah!" too.

It was as bad as I remembered. I noticed that Mary took only a small sip and set her glass off to the side.

Ugo rubbed his hands together. "I thought you would enjoy an authentic Sicilian restaurant," he told me, "not a fancy place. You feel adventurous? You want to try some of our traditional foods?"

I was hungry, not adventurous. The last meal I'd had was a Continental breakfast at the Europa twelve hours before. What I wanted was the biggest plate of lasagna the kitchen could make, but not at the cost of disappointing my host. "Absolutely," I said. "I've been looking forward to it."

Others were helping themselves from a self-service antipasto table, but Ugo, who may have felt such behavior in my presence would have been déclassé, had a waiter deliver a platterful to us. Almost everything on it was from the nearby sea: a marinated salad of shrimp and octopus; mussels baked with olive oil and bread crumbs; thin, fried cakes made of tiny, transparent fish complete with heads and tails; fresh tuna, fresh sardines; sea urchins in the shell—all at room temperature and all delicious, except for the sea urchin, which I regarded doubtfully, not quite sure how to approach it.

"One eats only the eggs, this orange stuff," Ugo explained, turning over a shell on his own plate. "It's like caviar. One scoops it up with a piece of bread, so."

I tried one and found it like a mouthful of unflavored gelatin, nothing remotely like caviar. The bread was good, though. "Interesting," I said.

" Now," Ugo said brightly, "a test for freshness. If we turn it over"—he did so with the tip of a knife—"we should find that the spines still move. And so they do." He leaned toward me, over the purple, feebly waving spines, happy and maybe just a little malicious. "You ate it while it was alive! What do you think of that?"

Not a lot, really. What we were looking at was reflex activity in the rudimentary nerve fibers under the exoskeleton, unconnected to any central nervous system. (You're right, this is not the sort of thing I'd ordinarily know, but I'd once done a project on the Echinodermata for a high school biology contest; I'd gotten an honorable mention for it.) Once again, though, why disappoint Ugo? Who could blame him for a little jovial malice after the way I'd ruined his day over the Uytewael? I looked down and grimaced. "My God, it's still wriggling!"

For some people it would have been overkill, but Ugo beamed and showily tossed the insides of another urchin into his mouth.

"And look at these little fish!" I went on, shuddering. "You can see their eyes!"

Ugo delightedly shoveled in a dozen of them, eyes and all. Mary watched my performance without comment, but with one eyebrow infinitesimally raised.

His good humor restored, Ugo ordered the other courses for us, and the rest of the meal went well: spaghetti with fresh sardines, and grilled mullet with fennel, accompanied by two bottles of Corvo Bianco that went quickly to my head. Then coffee with a gigantic cassata Siciliana—a heavy, iced cake made with ricotta cheese and jellied fruit. We all ate and drank heartily and laughed a great deal.

Ugo and I were in the middle of telling Mary about the Uytewaei (by this time it seemed quite funny) when the restaurant went tense and quiet. Ugo stopped in mid-guffaw. I turned to follow his gaze and the gaze of everyone else I could see.

Two men in dark, conservative suits had entered and sat down at a table near the fire. They were conversing with Fabrizio in low voices.

"What is it?" I asked. "Who are they?"

"Sh!" Ugo said severely. "They are politicians."

"Politicians?"

He looked at me. "You don't understand what 'politician' means here?"

"The Mafia?"

It was Mary who answered. "The grown-up variety this time," she said in a low voice. She had switched to English. "Not just your plain old everyday Mafia, either. You're looking at the big wheels themselves, the padroni."

The Sicilian Mafia. Right there in the room with me. The people who had tried to blow me up that morning. Well, not precisely. Antuono had said that the ones who were directly involved were now in Bologna. Still, if these men were the padroni here, then it could hardly have happened without their knowledge, probably not without their authorization. These were the shadowy figures who pulled the strings, or at least the figures for whom the strings were pulled.

I shifted my chair to have a better look. They couldn't have been less intimidating. One was in his fifties, pudgy and bald, with thick glasses and a black fringe of baby-fine hair. The other, white-haired and fragile-looking, was about seventy, with elegant, long-fingered hands that he waved as he spoke, like a man leading a Haydn quartet. They had ordered a bottle of wine and were sipping from small glasses while people from other tables—almost in procession—came to them, bobbed, said a few words, and departed. Most left small offerings from their own tables: fruit, or pastry, or more wine.

A third man, in a flashier, double-breasted suit, stood a step behind them, his back against the fireplace wall. This one was younger, more fit, olive-skinned. Now and then he would lean over to whisper a few words to one of the Mafiosi, but mostly he let his expressionless eyes wander over the room. Periodically, he would nod peremptorily at someone; the person would eagerly hop up to come pay his respects at the table.

"Who's that other guy?" I asked.

"Secretary," Ugo said.

"What does that mean, bodyguard?"

"It means secretary," Ugo said crossly. "They don't need bodyguards."

He wasn't really paying attention to me; he was watching the newcomers intently. When his own signal to approach came, it was not from the "secretary," but from the white- haired man, who nodded to him with a smile, as a courteous monarch might motion a subject to approach. It was Ugo's turn to pay homage. He licked his lips, straightened his tie, and stood up.

"You think they would enjoy to try the cassata?" he asked Mary.

"Sure," she said, "it's pretty good."

We watched Ugo, all smiles and deference, take the cake to them and put it on a table already loaded with tribute.

"They'll never be able to eat all that stuff," I said.

"Don't worry about it," Mary said. "Fabrizio gives doggie bags."

"Mary, what did Ugo mean, they don't need bodyguards?"

"They don't need them, that's all. Nobody would dare hurt them."

"I see."

"No, you don't see. Nobody would dare to, but nobody would want to, either, Or hardly anybody. Sure, these creeps have turned every third Italian kid into a dope addict, but they also make it possible for everything to work around here. Without the Mafia everybody would be after his own graft, there'd be gang wars all over the place, there'd be a thousand little Mafias. They'd eat us up alive."

"So one big Mafia is better than a thousand little ones, is that the idea?" I usually thought of Mary as an American married to an Italian. Sometimes I forget she was half-Sicilian herself.

"You better believe it."

"Well, I see your point, but—"

"Look, there was a back road we took today, coming in from the airport. A few years ago there used to be this gang, like pirates. They worked the road late at night. They used two cars with walkie-talkies, one at either end, and when they got a lone car, they'd head it off and block it from in front and behind at this narrow bridge, to rob it. Sometimes they killed the passengers. It went on for months; nobody could do anything."

"What about the police?"

"Come on, the Catanian polizia are something else. The only thing that made any difference was when a few people got together and went to the Mafia, to those guys sitting right there. There was no protection fee involved, you understand, no subscription, no Mafia interest. But the gang was giving the area a bad name, and people just expected the Mafia to do something about it."

"And?"

"And a few mornings later they found the cars the gang was using, burned to crisps near the bridge. Three bodies inside, likewise fried. And that was the end of that. I'm telling you, when these guys go after you, you can forget it."

"Oh, wonderful. Did I tell you Colonel Antuono thinks it's the Mafia that's trying to kill me?"

She blinked at me. "The . . . oh, piffle, why would—"

At that moment Ugo returned, flushed and pleased with himself. "I told them all about you," he said proudly. "They were tremendously interested."

"I'll bet," I muttered. "They probably loved finding out I was still in one piece."

He looked at me peculiarly. "What?"

"I'll explain later, Ugo."

"They invite you to their table," he said. "They would like to meet you." He put a hand on my forearm. "It's an honor, Cristoforo."

"Well, I'd like to meet them, too," I said, pushing my chair out from the table.

The dark secretary was standing right behind me, smooth and snaky. "I am Basilio," he said in English. "When they sit down, you sit, too. When they stand up, you go. You are to ask them nothing, only answer. This is understood?"

Basilio, it seemed, was not only secretary but protocol chief, too. He waited, blocking my way until I nodded, then turned and led me to their table.

The two men rose. There were smiles and handshakes and friendly noises. If they were annoyed to find me still breathing, they didn't show it.

The older man with the graceful fingers was mild and courtly. "Benvenuto a Catania, dottore," he said. He smelled of soap and cologne.

It occurred to me that I might fare better if they thought I didn't understand Italian. "Molte grazie," I said haltingly. "Mi dispiace, io non parlo bene l'italiano. " I tried to make it sound as if I'd memorized it out of Berlitz.

Both men laughed pleasantly. The white-haired one waved me politely to a chair and we all sat. I accepted a small glass of dark, sweet wine. The pudgy one spoke quietly over his shoulder to Basilio, who stood at his side.

"They say," Basilio translated, "how long do you stay in Catania?"

"Only four days, unfortunately." It was actually only two days, but I'd learned my lesson: I wasn't going to start advertising my departure time again.

The information was conveyed by Basilio, who was given a second message, this time from the white-haired man. "They ask, what is your special competence, your expertise?"

"The Renaissance and Baroque periods."

This seemed to interest them, especially the older man.

"They say," Basilio said, "have you familiarity with Sicilian artists of the time?"

"Of course. Montorsoli, Pietro Novelli—they're known throughout the world." Not household names, perhaps, but why quibble? And oddly enough, I found myself wanting to please the older man.

He was pleased. He chuckled and nodded at me. "Known throughout the world," I heard him repeat in Italian.

For a while the three of us sipped and smiled at each other. I was conscious of envious stares from other tables. People were coveting my time with them, fretting that their own turns might be bypassed. Not that mine was doing me much good. For all the information that my clever no-spikka-da-Italian ploy had produced, I might have dispensed with it. There had been no muttered byplay in Italian about bombs or loot or anything else.

I decided to take hold of matters. "I had an interesting flight here today," I said.

Basilio translated.

"Ah?" said the pudgy one politely. Either his attention was beginning to wander or he was craftier than I thought. No doubt the latter.

"Yes," I said, "I was almost killed by a bomb."

With a quick stab of his cold eyes Basilio advised me against the propriety of this I repeated it.

Basilio shrugged. "He says," he told them in Italian, "that he encountered many difficulties and delays on his flight."

There were murmurs of sympathy, bland and perfunctory; nothing more. Something was peculiar here. Even with no more than Basilio's bowdlerized version to go on, their ears should have pricked at mention of the flight, but there had been nothing. Was Antuono wrong? Despite his "skilled undercover agents" and their months of information-gathering, had he come to the wrong conclusion about who was at the bottom of it all? Or—a fresh, unsettling possibility—had he been purposely misleading me? But why?"

The bald one said something to Basilio.

"They say, where you are from in America?"

"I was born in California."

This produced the first real show of interest in a while. "They say, you know of Sylvester Stallone the actor?"

"What? Yes. "

"Cugino!" the bald man exclaimed.

"Cousin," Basilio translated dutifully. "A distant cousin. His people come from nearby."

The bald man nodded vigorously, "Sí! " he said. "Sí!"

"Ah," I said. The conversation had edged over into the surreal. "Very interesting. Molto interessante."

More smiles, and the white-haired man stood up and held out his hand. Basilio looked meaningfully at me. I got up, too. There were bows and handshakes all around.

"Good-bye," said the white-haired man in labored, almost impenetrable English, "and good luck."

Half an hour later, as Ugo, Mary, and I were leaving, Ugo was summoned briefly back to their table. He joined us outside, all smiles.

"They liked you," he told me blissfully. "The insurance is arranged, the customs are taken care of."

I stared at him. "You mean those are the officials you were talking about? It's the Mafia that's helping me get that picture to The Hague?"

"Sure," he said. "Who else?"

Possibly it's occurred to you to wonder why I was so willing to personally convey a suspect painting to The Hague (even, as it now appeared, under the dubious sponsorship of the Mafia). Why not simply have it shipped there for van de Graaf's inspection? There was plenty of time, after all; Northerners in Italy was still months from opening. Why complicate my life?

If, however, you know your European geography, then all is clear. The Hague is even closer to Amsterdam than Rotterdam is; a mere nine miles, with fast, frequent trains between the two. This isn't to say that! manufactured an excuse to go there. Everything I'd told Ugo about the painting and about van de Graaf was true. All the same, my scrupulous if malleable conscience was not displeased at having a justifiable, work-related reason for a diversion to the west coast of Holland. I would fly there directly from Sicily,

From Ugo's I checked with Alitalia to make sure there was an early Monday morning flight with seats available. There was. I thanked the clerk without making a reservation; this time I would do my booking just before I boarded. Then I called van de Graaf to set up a 10:30 meeting at the Mauritshuis. And finally, saving the best for last, I called Anne to ask her to meet me at The Hague museum at noon.

"Can you be there?" I asked.

"With bells on," she said.