A Glancing Light

Chapter 12

Sure, just leave it to Antuono—who kept telling me that he didn't expect, didn't even intend, to bring anyone to justice. The people behind the thefts—the Mafia, if he was right–would just wind up a few billion lire richer, the insurance company a few billion lire poorer, and that would be the end of it; an inconsequential redistribution of wealth that Assicurazioni Generali was apparently happy to go along with, given the alternative.

Too bad about Max, and about a couple of murders along the way—but you couldn't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, could you?—and all's well that ends well. We would have the paintings; that's the important thing. The paintings would be preserved.

Except of course, that they wouldn't be preserved. Oh, we'd have them, all right—maybe—but you can't hack a stiff, fragile, five-hundred-year-old Giorgione out of its frame, roll it up, and stow it away God knows where, and expect to have quite the same painting when you unroll it two years later. Even that would be hoping for the best. Art thieves have been known to fold canvases (not salutary for aged pigment) or cut them into pieces, or even worse. And what about the future? If people committed theft and murder and got paid for it, weren't you just asking for it again? Was it really 120,000 works of art the carabinieri had recovered, or 1,000—each one stolen 120 times or so?

And these reflections, discouraging as they were, assumed that the paintings would actually be located, that Antuono had matters in hand, as he'd been at such pains to imply. But did he? Then why, with his months of information-gathering, with his "operation of great delicacy, great complexity," was he reduced to hoping that Benedetto Croce's crude "advertisement''—if that was really what it was—worked?

Such were my thoughts as I brooded over a bowl of seafood stew and a plate of stuck-to-each-other-any-which-way Italian rolls. I did have a stake in this, after all, over and above my normal curator's concern for the paintings. My friend had been crippled, and I myself hadn't been handled any too gently. It was only natural that I'd care how things turned out.

And, well, yes, all right, I was a little ticked off—or maybe not such a little—by Antuono's treating me as if I were some bungling do-gooder that kept getting underfoot. Twice now he'd referred to me as a meddler. Why couldn't the guy see I had something to offer? Did he really think his agents with their fake mustaches and sham spectacles could gain the kind of entree into the art world that I could? Or was he just too much of a prima donna to accept help from anyone?

I muttered something along these lines at the last of my zuppa di pesce, ordered an espresso, and tried to get Antuono out of my mind. As he'd said, he had his affairs to worry about; I had mine. Fine, the hell with him. I finished the bitter, bracing coffee in two swallows and headed for my appointment with the dour, orange-haired director of the Pinacoteca.

The Pinacoteca—the word is Greek for picture gallery — was located a few blocks from the Piazza Maggiore, in a well-maintained old building, now painted a mustard yellow, that had once been a Jesuit convent. At the end of Via Zamboni. it was just down the block from the crumbling palazzo that had been the seat of the University of Bologna since 1710, and the small square at the foot of the street was crowded with long-haired, studious-looking youngsters, book bags over their shoulders, engaged in what appeared to be weighty conversations with their peers. There was a fair amount of litter on the pavement, and, except for the Pinacoteca itself, the buildings in the area were showing their age. Peeling plaster, decomposing stucco, and general grunginess were all around, and the walls and columns were covered with tattered posters, most of them notices for concerts or lurid calls to arms. "Rivoluzione!," "Indipendenza!, " and "Giustizia!" appeared frequently, as did warlike photographs of Fidel and Che.

It was, in other words, a lot like Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and by the time I stepped onto the Pinacoteca's portico, I was feeling right at home, even a little nostalgic for my graduate years at Cal.

Inside, it was sharply different; no noise, no garbage, no picturesque seediness. All very serene and modem. The cellblock interior of the old convent had been gutted and replaced by spacious, off-white rooms in which the art treasures were expertly shown off against uncluttered settings. I was fifteen minutes early for my meeting with Di Vecchio, so of course I took the time to wander through. I'd been there before, but never with the theft on my mind, and this time I found myself heading for the two rooms from which the paintings had been stolen.

As Di Vecchio had said, there was no "junk" in the 6,000- piece collection, but most of what the museum did have was work by regional artists who, however good, had never achieved worldwide recognition. These the thieves had left alone; understandably, in my opinion. Would you risk pursuit and prison to steal a Bugardini, a Garofalo ("the Raphael of Ferrara"), a Marco Zoppo?

This is not to say that the Pinacoteca was a second-rate museum. Most of the world's great art museums are equally provincial: the Uffizi, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum—all are primarily showcases for their native sons. It takes a museum without much of a cultural pedigree of its own (the Metropolitan in New York), or with a long history of big spending (London's National Gallery), or with one of the world's preeminent looters in its past (the Louvre), to be truly eclectic. And even the Louvre is a little overrepresented in its Rigauds and Prud'hons, if you ask me.

The thieves had also bypassed the famous paintings in the gallery given to the work of Guido Reni, Bologna's foremost artist. All of these had been created to hang in churches and be seen from a distance, so they were huge, averaging twelve feet by twenty-five. Even when cut from their frames and rolled up, they lacked portability—imagine hurriedly stuffing one in the trunk of a car. The same for a large Raphael in another room.

What had they taken, then? Those paintings small enough to tuck under an arm when cut free and rolled up, that were by artists famous enough to bring real money in Riyadh or Tokyo or Cleveland. The Pinacoteca had lost works by Corregio, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, the Carracci, Veronese—eighteen great masterpieces in all.

Well, seventeen. The Botticelli, a Pietà, had been painted in the clumsy, semi-hysterical style of his sadly degraded sixties, thirty years after the glorious days of the Primavera. Definitely Mickey Mouse stuff, to use the appropriate art- historical terminology. Not that I'd tell that to Di Vecchio, of course. Anyway, a Botticelli was a Botticelli. One didn't take its theft lightly.

Most of the pictures had been taken from the second-floor room in which I was now standing, and the one next to it. These rooms were different from most of the others in that they had no windows, only skylights. Assuming the thieves had used a rope ladder, the skylights would have made it easy to enter and leave the gallery without being observed, and the absence of windows would have given them privacy while they worked. The question was, how had they gotten in, and gotten the pictures off the walls, without tripping the alarms? Surely their security system hadn't just happened to be off, like Clara's. And where had the night guards been? It was something I'd never asked Di Vecchio about before; but then I'd never been put into the hospital in connection with it, either.

From the corner of my eye I saw a guard watching me steadily. I thought it best to stop studying the skylight and instead focused on the wall in front of me, on which hung a large wooden altarpiece, a Christ Enthroned by the thirteenth‑century Florentine master Cimabue. Cimabue is one of those artists I know I should like, I really should. Very important historically. A splendid craftsman, the teacher of Giotto (maybe), the man who bridged the gap between the art of antiquity and the new humanistic world view, etc., etc. But I just don't like him; he gives me the creeps.

Tony Whitehead has pointed out that this is hardly an apt sentiment from a curator of a major art museum, and that the least I could do would be to come up with a more felicitous way to put it. So I suppose I ought to rattle on about the frozen Byzantine angularity of Cimabue, or the grim, Gothic starkness. But the long and short of it is that Cimabue gives me the creeps. Sue me.

Not that I didn't stay there studying the altarpiece under the eye of the guard. I seem to spend a lot of time studying paintings I don't like under the eyes of museum guards. The problem is, I always feel rotten just striding through a gallery, however wretched, in which some poor guard spends most of his working life. As a result, I usually feel compelled to demonstrate some appreciation, even if it's pretense. Just one more sign of insecurity resulting from my infantile anaclitic redefinition of love objects, I suppose.

When I'd stood there long enough to make him feel better (all right, Louis, to make me feel better), I walked back to the elevator landing and went through the frosted-glass double doors that led to the administrative wing. Di Vecchio was in his office, severe and upright behind his steel desk in the armless, no-nonsense secretary's chair he favored. He glanced up from a letter he was reading and waved me into a rigid, molded-plastic chair, also armless. Three years ago, when the amiable, elderly Dr. Sorge Begontina had still been director, this office had been a homely, clubby place reeking of cigar smoke and stocked with ratty, comfortable furniture: a battered wooden desk with a row of cubbyholes at the back, threadbare Persian carpet, even a couple of sagging, horsehair-stuffed armchairs that were probably older than Begontina.

But with the coming of Amedeo Di Vecchio, the horsehair had gone, as had the cigar smoke and the friendly clutter of Etruscan pottery shards and odd bits of Roman sculpture— a marble forefinger, half a sandaled foot, a fold of toga—that had weighted down open books or piles of paper, or simply sat there. Now the lines were clean and the furniture steel and plastic in simple primary colors. No more arms on the chairs. The only art on the walls was a set of engravings of the Greek ruins at Paestum. Beyond those frosted glass doors Di Vecchio might live in a Renaissance world of vibrant, subtle colors and bursting forms, but when it came to decorating his personal workspace, his own austere socialist's taste came to the fore.

I settled myself into the hard chair as comfortably as I could while he signed the letter and placed it on a tray. He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses on the bump at the top of his nose and sat more erectly in his own comfortless chair. With his fringe of a beard, his gaunt limbs, and his glittery eyes he looked like something from a Byzantine mosaic himself.

"Good afternoon, Christopher."

"Amedeo, do you happen to like Cimabue?"

He blinked. "Of course. I find him deeply moving. Cimabue is superb, without peer; the greatest of all the Duecento masters. Why do you smile?"

"Was I smiling?"

"You are smiling." But he didn't pursue it. Di Vecchio, I knew, considered me insufficiently serious-minded; not as bad as Max, but not adequately professional, either. He raised a finger to touch his cheek in the same spot where my most visible bruise was. "You're all right now?"

"I'm fine. I can't say the same for Max."

"I know," he said grimly. "I went to see him yesterday. Why wouldn't he listen to me? Why wouldn't he listen to Dr. Luca?"

"He's listening now. He won't talk to Antuono."

He glanced sharply at me. "I didn't tell him not to talk to Antuono. I told him not to shout to everyone in Bologna that he was going to do it. I want him to talk to Antuono if he knows something. You think I don't want those pictures back?"

I said something soothing. Di Vecchio scratched irritably at the grizzled edge of his red beard and grumbled. "Well," I said, "let's get down to business."

My business with Di Vecchio was the same as it had been with Clara Gozzi: going over the particulars arising from the loan of paintings to Northerners in Italy. This took a lot longer to get through with Di Vecchio than it had with Clara. Partly this was because the Pinacoteca was lending us twenty- four pictures, compared to Clara's four, but mostly it was because Clara was an easygoing sort who was happy to trust the details to others, while Di Vecchio was a fussy stickler who—well, Di Vecchio was Di Vecchio. It took us two hours, most of which was spent trying to answer his finicky questions on insurance; specifically, on the federal special indemnification grant we'd gotten over and above the usual National Endowment of the Arts funding. Like Clara, I'm not too detail-oriented, and it was rough going.

"Very good," Di Vecchio said, terminating the exacting discussion at last. Folders and finders were shoved into a desk drawer, and he leaned back—that is to say, he sat up straighter—in his unyielding chair. "I understand you were at Salvatorelli this morning when the Eagle of Lombardy swooped down on his prey. Is it true you rode back to Bologna with the great man?"

I wasn't surprised to learn he already knew about it. The art world grapevine is amazing, practically instantaneous. "It's true," I said. "We had a chat."

"And is he getting anywhere, our Eagle?"

"Well, as I understand it, the Morandi and the Carrà —"

He jerked impatiently. "I'm not talking about the Morandi and the Carrà. He hasn't been sent to Bologna to recover Morandis and Carràs."

"He thinks there may be a connection, though, or at least that one could develop. He thinks Filippo Croce set this up as a sort of advertisement to the people who have the paintings."

"It could be. What is he doing about this?"

"I don't know. I suppose he's keeping an eye on Croce to see what develops."

He made a hissing sound. "To see what develops," he repeated disdainfully. "Forgive me, but I don't feel cheered. Christopher, they've already had those paintings for almost two years. Who knows what's happened to them by now? For all we know, by now they've been—"

Don't say it, I thought.

"—carved up and recombined. Would we even know them?"

Carved up and recombined. Words to strike dismay into the heart of the most steel-nerved of curators. Di Vecchio was referring to the barbaric, increasingly common practice of mutilating art to make it more saleable and less recognizable at the same time. A skillful and corrupt restorer, for example, might take a five-by-seven-foot late-Renaissance mythological painting, too big for today's rooms, and chop it into fragments, creating three or four smaller pictures, and usually throwing away—throwing away!—twenty to forty percent of the original canvas as unusable.

Or a beautiful old French cabinet might have the maindron—the proud stamp of its maker—removed, and the rich old finish stripped and redone. Or the signature of a famous sixteenth-century painter might be changed to that of a lesser- known one. Or the painting itself might be altered in any of a thousand ways.

At first glance, these alterations don't seem to make much sense. Don't they drastically reduce the value of the art pieces? Yes, but art thieves—or rather the receivers or dealers who hire them, which is usually the way it's done nowadays—can cheerfully absorb the losses. The economics are simple: Say you hire a gang to steal five paintings worth $800,000, for which they're paid $10,000. You then pay your crooked restorer $5,000 apiece to change them, or $25,000 in all. Now they are much less traceable, but of course they're only worth, say, $300,000.

So what? When they are sold you will have invested $35,000 and gotten a return of $300,000. Even an unenlightened business mind like mine knows a good deal when it sees one like that.

"You don't really think that's what happened to them?" I asked, looking for reassurance. The idea that someone might have butchered those Tintorettos, the Giorgione, the Veronese ... my God, it didn't bear thinking about.

"We must face the possibility," Di Vecchio replied.

"But the Rubens," I said, forced to reassure myself. "Clara's Rubens. It turned up whole."

"True, but of all them it's the picture least able to be altered. How can you cut up into several paintings a portrait of a single subject? And the subject, Hélène Fourment, is well-known, and associated with Rubens and only Rubens. She would be very difficult to disguise."

I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't going to get any reassurance.

"Perhaps that's why it was returned," he continued. "It was the only way to collect any money."

"But nobody collected any money. Blusher donated it to the museum."

"Oh? Well, that's very puzzling. "

"Amedeo, how did they ever get in here? Weren't the alarms working?"

He bristled. "Of course they were working. We have four separate systems on individual circuits."

"Then how did they manage it?"

He glowered angrily at me for a moment, then sighed, took off his glasses, and wearily rubbed the lumpy bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "They used a ladder to enter through the window of a bathroom here on the upper floor."

"Not through a skylight?"

"A bathroom. Sometime earlier, from inside, they had used tape to deactivate the alarm-latch of this window, "

"From inside? But if they'd already gotten in, why didn't they just take the paintings then and there? Why risk coming back and fooling around with ladders?"

"I must assume that the window was modified during the day, while the museum was open and people were about. The theft itself took place between twelve-thirty and one- thirty at night."

"I don't get it, Amedeo. Even if they took care of the window alarm, what about the inside systems? I mean, you must have sensors that pick up people walking around. Infrared beams . . ."

"Photo-electric barriers, movement sensors, pressure alarms, everything you could wish. But," he said, looking pained, "every night at twelve-thirty come the people who clean, or so they did at the time. We could not have them setting off bells at every step, so when they would arrive, security became somewhat…well…"

Sloppy, I said to myself.

"Flexible," Di Vecchio said.

I leaned forward. "Amedeo, if they knew about that, then there must have been some inside involvement, someone on the museum staff."

"That is extremely unlikely," he said stiffly.

I didn't think so. The art world had a long, unhappy history of betrayal by its own.

"But didn't the police question them?" I asked.

"Of course. Aren't the workers always the first to be hounded? The police, the carabinieri, the prosecutor, every conceivable arm of the politico-commercial apparatus. Naturally, nothing of value was learned."

When Di Vecchio started going on about workers and the politico-commercial apparatus, there wasn't much to be gained from continuing the discussion, and I stood up, thanked him, and began to say good-bye.

"Can you stay a moment?" he asked. "Dr. Luca asked to see you. I think he would simply like to hear that everything is going well. You know where his office is?"

"Somewhere in this building. I forget just where."

"It's downstairs. You have to go around the temporary exhibit area ... Come, it's simpler to take you."

Benedetto Luca's office was behind a door the frosted glass segment of which was almost completely taken up with his title: "Soprintendente per i beni artistici historici per la provincia di Bologna-Ferrara-Forlì-Ravenna, Repubblica Italiana." Inside the decor befitted this august appellation: green-shaded brass lamps, roomy chairs of deeply polished wood and copper-studded burgundy leather, a massive nineteenth-century desk. Luca got up from behind the desk to murmur a mellow, dignified welcome, and lead us to an informal grouping of soft chairs—with arms, I was glad to see—against one of the handsome paneled walls, under a softly backlit Etruscan funerary head mounted in a shadow box.

"Well, Christopher," he said, "you're all right? Your injuries aren't serious?"

"No, sir, I'm fine."

"Good. Poor Massimiliano. Terrible thing, terrible. And the arrangements for the exhibition?"

"No problems there. I saw signora Gozzi about her loan yesterday, and Amedeo and I just finished discussing the state collection. And your deputy, signora Nervi, took care of all the details with the shipper."

"Fine, fine," Luca said, his deep, marvelous voice resonant and, as always, a little vacant. "And the four paintings to be borrowed from Ugo Scoccimarro? What of them? You need to take special care there. Signor Scoccimarro is .. . well, shall we say, not experienced in these matters."

"I'll be seeing him tomorrow. I'm catching a noon flight to Sicily."

" Ah, good. I see there's no reason for me to be concerned. You have everything under control." He stood up and shook hands with me. "Perhaps we can have lunch when you return? Monday?"

"I'm sorry, I can't. I'm coming back to Bologna just to pick up my things late Sunday night. Then I fly back to Seattle early Monday. But I'll take you up when I come back."

"Fine." His creased, aristocratic features arranged themselves into an expression of concerned gravity. "Tell me, Christopher: You saw our friend Colonel Antuono in action today. Were you impressed? Do you have hopes he'll recover our paintings?"

It took me a second to answer. "I have hopes, yes."

A derisive bark of laughter came from Di Vecchio. "Hopes," he said.