A Glancing Light

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 physically 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.

On the other hand, some lenders have little to tell you. From what I knew of Clara, I expected her to be one of these. Crusty, yes, but she wasn't a stickler. Or so I hoped.

My pressing of the buzzer wasA GLAINUIPIG- LIU111 Yid

answered by a tall, annoyed- looking woman in a severely tailored suit. She peered distractedly and with impatience at me, as if I'd interrupted some terribly pressing task. This was the third time in a year I had come to see Clara, and the same woman had responded each time in the same way. By now I was beginning to understand that this was her normal manner. It was, I supposed, what came of working too long for Clara.

"I'm Christopher Norgren," I said in Italian. "I have an appointment with signora Gozzi."

"You're too early," she told me brusquely, remaining in character. "Your appointment is in fifteen minutes. You'll have to wait."

Clara's querulous voice rang out. "Who is that? Christopher? You're early, damn it. Come in, come in!"

Under the stern eye of the maid, or secretary, or whatever she was, I headed for the doorway from which the gruff voice had come, walking down a long, unfurnished hallway hung like a museum gallery with rows of contemporary paintings on both walls: Kiefer, Dine, Diebenkorn, others I didn't know. I didn't like any of them. Clara's tastes were quite eclectic, more so than mine, and her collection was arranged chronologically, with the most recent on the ground floor, the earliest (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) at the top. The higher I climbed, the happier I usually was.

I entered an unfinished room that had probably once been the dining room, and was treated to a restrained version of the full Mediterranean greeting: bear hug, back-pats, even a kiss on, or at least in the vicinity of, each cheek. This was uncharacteristically exuberant for Clara. I understood that I was being thanked for my part in recovering the Rubens.

"This is Christopher Norgren," she announced in Italian to a shiny-faced man with pale, plastered-down hair and a dandy's pencil-line mustache. "A scholar of note in his field, but lamentably narrow."

Had Clara delivered her many such remarks with a smile or even the mordant lifting of an eyebrow—anything to suggest irony—she would have been regarded as a witty woman. But she never did. Her pouchy, homely face rarely changed its indifferent expression.

"Sono molto lieto—" the man began, but Clara interrupted him.

"His Italian stinks. If you hope to be understood, Filippo, use English."

"Okay, sure, but, you know, my English stinks." He said this in English with a grin, a small man of fifty in a polka- dot bow tie and a checked, wasp-waisted sport coat. His accent reminded me of Ugo's speech, so I assumed he was Sicilian, too. He held out a manicured hand with bulky rings on two fingers. "I am Filippo Croce. And you are Christopher Norgren?"

I was used to the mild wonder with which this was asked. The trouble is, you see, I don't look like any kind of a museum curator, let alone a curator of Renaissance and Baroque art. At thirty-four, I'm a little young for the job, but more than that I don't look scholarly or even particularly intelligent; I don't look patrician; I don't look ... well, consequential. I'm of average build, average height, with an average brown mustache, and I look, so I've been told, like your average, easygoing, nice guy who works in computer store or maybe for the government. I mean, I look like a curator to me, but enough people have told me I don't so that I'm used to it by now.

"You two don't know each other?" Clara said, surprised. Her English was excellent, the slight accent not so much Italian as a sort of generic Continental, the result of having homes in four countries. "But no, of course you wouldn't. Filippo's been in Ferrara less than a year, haven't you, Filippo?"

"Five months," he said to me. "I was in the south before. I am a dealer in art." With a small flourish he produced an embossed card:

F. Croce

Galleria d'Arte Moderna

Corso della Giovecca, 16

Ferrara

"Christopher is the man who rescued Max Cabot the other night," Clara told him.

"I'm afraid I didn't do too good a job," I said.

Croce clucked sympathetically.

"It was Max's own fault, of course," Clara said crossly. "If he hadn't gone around shouting about going to the police, it wouldn't have happened at all. Stupid man." She hadn't been at the dinner the other night, but of course the story wouldn't have taken long to get to Ferrara.

"They smashed both his legs, you know," I said. "He won't ever walk normally again."

I suppose that what I had in mind was to stir up a little sympathy for poor Max, but it was wasted on Clara. "The man doesn't understand the meaning of discretion, of simple prudence, " she said, going along with Di Vecchio and Luca. "Careless, thoughtless. He runs off at the mouth." This was accompanied by an illustrative twirling of fingers at her own mouth. "What about the other one, Scoccimarro? Wasn't he with you, too? Was he hurt?"

"No, we were on our way back from seeing him off at the station when it happened."

"Ugo's a good sort. If you ask him something he gives you the answer. You can tell him I said so."

"I will. I'm flying to Sicily on Saturday."

"You can also tell him he likes his grappa too much."

There was an awkward silence broken by Croce's clearing of his throat. "Well, signora, perhaps I go now. I can return—"

"Filippo is trying to convince me I can't live without some more pictures," Clara said, gesturing at three huge paintings propped along the walls, mounted but unframed. "What do you think, Christopher?"

I looked at them. Each was about seven feet by six and consisted of pallid, empty backgrounds on which a few lurid streaks of purple, orange, and bloody red had been whacked on with a trowel–thick and garish. Two of them were done on pegboard, with the holes clearly showing and even some hooks and brackets attached. They seemed to be examples of Comic Abstractionism, which Penny Hauck, Seattle's curator of contemporary painting, had once explained to me, It was, she said, an ironic Abstract Expressionist movement dedicated to demonstrating the absurdity of the Abstract Expressionist movement in today's image-ridden world.

I know, I don't understand it either. I'm just telling you what she said.

"Well?" Clara said.

If it were I, I thought, I could live without them. "They're not really the kind of thing I'm too informed about," I said delicately.

"Christopher's very discreet, Clara said. "He means he can't stand them."

I've been told (by Tony Whitehead, mainly) that I'm not catholic enough in my tastes, that I should strive to appreciate modern and postmodern art more and curb my anachronistic tendency to think in terms of better and worse.

"Taken in their own context," Tony once demanded, "can you stand there and say that the chipped urinals and rusty bottle racks of neo-Dadaism are any less valid, any less 'art' than the sculptures of Michelangelo, the paintings of Raphael? Can you?"

"You're damn r—" I'd begun.

"Of course you can't. You know damn well that art historians don't make that kind of culturally biased value judgment."

"But I'm an art historian and I make that kind of value judgment, so obviously they do," I'd said, which I'd thought was pretty good, but which didn't seem to strike him as much of an answer.

This is all by way of saying that Clara was right. I couldn't stand the stuff.

Croce tipped back his head and laughed indulgently. "You don't like these pictures so much?"

Not like them so much? I wasn't that keen on being in the same room with them. But I didn't want to offend him. "I work mostly in Renaissance and Baroque art," I said with what was intended as a self-deprecatory smile. "Pretty much representational stuff. The twentieth century's a little new for me."

"Ah!" Croce exclaimed, interpreting my response as one of ignorance and launching into a vigorous discourse on projective spaces and revolutionary perspectival structure. His English wasn't up to it, forcing him to slip in and out of Italian, which left me even further behind. Despite his enthusiasm, I couldn't help feeling there was something inauthentic about him, something a little off. Maybe he was selling too hard, which reputable dealers don't do. Maybe it was the checked coat, polka-dot tie, and glittery rings (and pointed, mirror-shined elevator shoes); he was foppish and raffish at the same time, like an old-time music-hall performer. Maybe it was the way he kept smoothing that plastered-down hair. He just didn't look like a trustworthy dealer to me.

But then I don't look like a bona fide art curator.

I wasn't worried about him putting anything over on Clara, who stood in a corner, impassively watching him go through his paces. "I don't think you're going to convert Christopher," she said dryly when he paused for breath.

He laughed, not very emphatically, and blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. "I think I don't convert you, either, signora. But that's all right. I leave them here for two, three days, and you decide, all right?"

"Fine. Call me Monday."

"Molte grazie, signora. A lunedi prossimo. Arrivederci."

A bow to Clara, a tentative, quickly withdrawn motion as if to kiss her hand, a bow and a sweaty handshake for me, and he was gone.

"Are you really thinking of buying these?" I asked her.

"I am, and don't look so damned superior. Do you know what your problem is, Christopher? I'll tell you. You persist in seeing art solely in aesthetic terms; you refuse to consider it from the standpoint of capital investment."

I smiled. "That's my problem, all right."

"Tell me, does your pitifully limited knowledge of this century's art extend to the Italian Transavantguardia?"

"Mimmo Paladino, that bunch?"

"Yes, that bunch," she said sarcastically. "I have two Paladinos. Do you know what I paid for them in 1978? A thousand dollars each. Would you like to know what I sold one of them for this week?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"I don't think so, either." She laughed suddenly, and her eyes warmed. Her laugh, not a frequent phenomenon, was one of her few redeeming physical features. When I said that Clara was ill-favored, I was putting it mildly. She was a bulky, shapeless woman with pockmarked skin and bulging, red-rimmed eyes, one of them disconcertingly larger than the other. I had yet to see her dressed in anything but a capacious, dark dress of indeterminate style.

"Well," she said, "you're here to talk about the arrangements for your show, yes? So let's talk about them. Come."

She stumped out of the room. I followed. With Clara, that's what you did. We went to a room with a couple of armchairs and a settee, which was hung with canvases by some of the foremost artists of the Italian Transavantguardia, best left undescribed. As expected, Clara had no unrealistic demands about the security and showing of her pictures, and only a few questions about transportation. These were summarily and satisfactorily dealt with.

She terminated the discussion with a nod. "So, you want to go look at the paintings, I suppose?" She spoke gruffly, but the light shone again in her eyes.

I had already seen them more than once, but of course I said yes. To say no would have been unkind; every collector loves showing off her treasures. Besides, I really wanted to. What kind of art curator would I be if I didn't enjoy looking at paintings? Most important, I needed to look at some real art (forgive me, Tony) after having been trapped on Clara's ground floor for an hour.

The four pictures she was lending were two floors higher: one by Fragonard, one by Van Dyck, and two by a couple of lesser-known seventeenth-century Dutch painters; all had studied in Italy. To tell the truth, none of them were first-rate examples of the artists' work, but they were pretty enough (surpassingly so, after what I'd just been looking at), and historically instructive. The point of Northerners in Italy, after all, was to demonstrate Italian influences on northern European artists who had lived in Italy.

Those influences were most obvious in the two Dutch pieces, A Village Fair by Jan Baptist Weenix and an evocative Shrimp-Catching by Moonlight by his cousin Nicolaes Berchem, both painted in the 1640s, both set against classical Italianate landscapes complete with the romantic ruins of ancient buildings. Jan Baptist, in fact, had been so thoroughly Italianized he returned to Holland calling himself Giovanni Battista. An early soulmate of Max's.

The Van Dyck was a portrait of Maria dé Medici done in 1627, at the end of a six-year stay in Genoa and Venice. In it Van Dyck was not at his elegant best; it was almost as if the intense color borrowed from the Venetians had overwhelmed his own restrained good taste.

Finest of the lot was a mid-sized painting by the young Fragonard. Not one of the congenial, fluffy pieces that would briefly make him the toast of Paris later on, but a classical landscape obviously painted to please his master Tiepolo, airy and alight with clean, clear colors.

This we stood looking at for some time. "I love the sunlight in this picture," Clara said. "Not lush, like the Caravaggisti, but—what would you call it, Christopher?"

"A glancing light," I said after a moment, "like real sunlight on real water and trees. It's not of the objects; it's reflected off them. You feel as if it all depends on your own perspective. I'm not quite sure how he did it."

She nodded, smiling. "A glancing light. Well, come on, it's almost one. I owe you the best lunch in Ferrara."

"You owe me a lot more than that, but, okay, I'll settle for lunch."

She drove me herself, in an unpretentious blue Fiat, to La Provvidenza, a restaurant so exclusive there was no sign outside, nothing to indicate there was a restaurant behind the blank white wall. Inside, it was elegant-rustic, with used- brick walls and gleaming wooden floors. It was filled with dark-suited businessmen at the tables, and humming with lithe, sloe-eyed waiters in peach dinner jackets, any of whom might have served as the model for Donatello's svelte, young David. A bottle of Soave was opened and poured without our asking as we sat down.

"To the Rubens," Clara said, lifting her glass.

"To the Rubens."

She drank a third of the wine and put down the glass. Immediately a peach-sleeved arm reached between us to top it off. A few seconds later it returned to lay down menus.

Clara lifted hers without looking at it. "Will Max really never walk again?"

"Not well."

"Well, I'm sorry for him. It's a hard thing." This inadvertent moment of human kindness was quickly made up for. "But he has no one to blame but himself. He's a careless man, not discreet. He shouldn't be in the business he's in."

"Clara, Max said that there were five people who knew his security systems well enough to disengage them. Amedeo Di Vecchio was one. Do you know who any of the others were?"

The question surprised me almost as much as Clara. What was I doing, starting my own investigation?

"Me?" Clara exclaimed. "How should I know that?" A cigarette jiggled at the corner of her mouth while she spoke, her third since we'd left her house twenty minutes before. She had lit up greedily the moment the door had closed behind us. As a collector, she wouldn't smoke around her paintings, but she made up for it everywhere else.

"In any case," she said, "I don't believe for a minute that Max told only five people. I think everybody in Bologna knew. Max doesn't have secrets. Have you ever been around him when he's drinking?"

"I know what you mean."

"Talk, talk, talk," she said, which pretty well summed it up. "I should have sued him at the time, when the Rubens was first stolen."

"Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I?" Clara peered at me with a sober, bleary look that I was beginning to recognize as her version of waggishness. "Christopher, how familiar are you with the Italian legal system?"

"Not very." And Colonel Antuono hadn't done much to edify me.

"You're fortunate. It is, should I say, a little tangled, and the results somewhat erratic. We have a saying here: Never sue when you're in the right. It's too risky."

I laughed, and we ordered from the young waiter who had been standing at the ready. Lunch began with antipasto from a self-service table against the far wall. I offered to get Clara's for her, but she shook her head and, with a movement of her chin, sent the waiter scurrying for her instead. A good thing, too, because I had all I could do to manage my own. It is not lasagna or fettuccine or tortellini that I dream hungrily about when I think of Italy's food, but the antipasto tables, and the one at La Provvidenza was as good as they come. I loaded my plate with mussels and shrimp, marinated octopus, prosciutto, smoked mackerel, oily roasted red peppers, two gleaming whole anchovies, and a thick wedge of artichoke frittata. Halfway back, I returned to get a roll, which had to be precariously set on top of the frittata.

This Smorgie-Bob's-all-you-can-eat approach is not the way they do things in Italy, but in my own defense I'll point out that I had had only coffee and a brioche for breakfast, a couple of stale little sandwiches for last night's dinner, and not much else since the attack three days before.

Clara was already eating when I came back. One of those large people who never seems to eat much, at least in public, she had on her plate only a slice of prosciutto and some cheese. She stopped chewing and studied my heaped plate intently. "I think you missed the squid," she said.

"I'll get some when I go back for seconds," I told her, and dug in.

"Christopher," she said after leaving me to it for a few minutes, "this matter of my Rubens. Tell me, what are your impressions of the way it resolved itself? How much do you believe this Blusher's account?" She had finished her hors d'oeuvres and pushed her plate away. A cigarette was back dancing at the side of her mouth.

I considered the question while I finished chewing a bony, crackling mouthful of anchovy. By now I'd given Mike Blusher a lot more thought, and I knew precisely what it was I suspected him of. In the last few decades the field of art thievery had developed well beyond the crude old days when paintings had usually been stolen and then held for ransom. Now, with the prodigious rewards offered by insurance companies, nasty ransom demands had become unnecessary. You could be more decorous. You merely stole the piece of art, waited awhile, and then turned it in for the insurance reward. All you had to do was come up with some reproachless way of "finding" the object in question and getting the word to the insurance company.

It was safer, less complicated, and more civilized than trying to collect ransom, less dangerous than trying to fence stolen art. The money was better, too. On the black market the going rate was only three or four percent of the value, as opposed to the ten percent most insurance companies would pay. And, as in Blusher's case, one could even wind up with some favorable publicity as a bonus.

After all, wouldn't you want to buy a fake antique ashtray from the guy who discovered the famous stolen Rubens?

But it took patience, ingenuity, and care, none of which had seemed to be Blusher's strong suits. Or had I underrated him? Was he more patient, ingenious, and careful than I'd thought? I was beginning to believe it was possible. And if ever an operation was made for processing stolen art, Venezia Trading Company was it. Remember Chesterton's famous question about the best place to hide a stolen Madonna? Well, apply it to a stolen painting and the answer was surely among five hundred look-alike paintings.

There was another possibility, too. It might be that Blusher wasn't in it alone. It might be that Trasporti Salvatorelli was more in the thick of things than Luca and Di Vecchio gave them credit for, and the whole affair had been concocted between them and Blusher. After Blusher collected his reward and the dust settled, the money would be split. Or maybe not split. Maybe the Salvatorellis had been behind it, and Blusher was only a hireling who would receive a small cut.

I told all this to Clara, almost beginning to believe it myself. She sat listening, fingers steepled against her upper lip. "Christopher, let me ask you this." She leaned forward, shaking another cigarette from her pack. Before she got it to her mouth the peach-sleeved arm shot forward with a lighter. She sucked in a deep lungful and wedged the cigarette in the corner of her mouth as before. "Assuming that something crooked is going on," she continued, "why do you think the Rubens is the only picture to surface in this way? Why none of my other paintings? Why none stolen from the Pinacoteca?"

"I suppose," I said doubtfully, "that the theft of the Rubens might have had nothing to do with the others, that it was a different gang. A coincidence."

She snorted. "On the same night? Within a few hours of the time my Correggio and my Bronzinos were being taken from my home?" She shut her eyes for a moment, mourning her Correggio and Bronzinos. "Don't be ridiculous."

I nodded, agreeing with her. "Why, then?"

"I'm asking you."

By now our second courses had come. I had a couple of mouthfuls of a fragrant risotto con funghi while I thought about it. "Clara, do you happen to know if all the paintings stolen that night were insured by the same company?"

"They were, yes: Assicurazioni Generali."

"Well, then, the Rubens could have been a feeler, to see if the insurance company would come through and be cooperative—you know, no hard questions, no investigation, no charges."

She cocked her head, evaluating the idea. "It's possible, yes."

"Now may I ask you something?"

She lifted her head warily.

"How did they manage to steal the paintings from your house? How did they get in?"

"What's the difference?" she said gruffly, poking away at her spaghetti alla Bolognese. "It's water under the bridge."

"Didn't you have security systems in place?"

"Of course I had security systems in place. What do you think?"

"Well, who knew about them?"

"Nobody knew. You think I'm your friend Max?"

"Do you think it was an inside job? Somebody on your staff?"

"No." She was mumbling into her food. I could hardly hear her.

"Well, then, what—"

The hand holding the fork thumped exasperatedly on the table. "They weren't turned on, all right? I forgot to turn the damn things on!"

"You—" I did manage to keep down a sudden burst of laughter, but something must have twitched somewhere, because she raised her fork menacingly.

"The merest hint of a smile and you'll be impaled, Christopher. I warn you."

I said: "I was startled, I wasn't amused," half of which was true.

It had been a fleeting moment of amusement, however. Clara had my sympathy. Comic Abstractionists and Trans-avantguardists may have represented so much capital investment for her, but her love for the Old Masters was as deep as mine. To lose a Correggio from carelessness . . .

"I take my paintings down fairly often," she said quietly. "Sometimes I would forget to reactivate the systems." She lifted her shoulders in a glum shrug. "Sometimes I would forget for days."

I nodded my commiseration. "It happens."

It does, too, unbelievable as it may seem. Clara's case was far from the first example. The most recent one, as far as I know, happened a few years ago on Christmas Eve when a priceless group of pre-Columbian artifacts was taken from the great National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. How did the thieves get in? They got in because the alarm system was switched off. How did they know it would be switched off? They knew because it had been switched off ever since it had broken down three years earlier.

"I leave the alarms on all the time now," she said grimly.

I didn't doubt it. The National Museum of Anthropology does, too.