A Glancing Light

Chapter 20

One more piece from Max. With it, unless I was way off track, I'd be able to fit most of the rest of it together. I'd have a why and I'd have a when, and I could stop looking over my shoulder. The trouble, I thought, was going to be getting it out of him. But as it turned out, I needn't have worried.

Clearly, he was well on the way to mending. With his bed cranked to a sitting position he looked comfortable, even cheerful. His face had lost its pallor and begun to plump out, and his mustache was sprouting again, as exuberant as ever, if a little grayer. The metal contraptions on his legs were still in place, bulky and awkward under the sheet, but the ropeand-pulley arrangement had been removed, so the place didn't look like a torture chamber anymore.

He was reading a magazine, propping it on a tray attached to the bed. He was, I saw with surprise, smoking a small black cigar; somewhat gingerly but with obvious relish. As I pushed the door quietly open he was putting the cigar down on a saucer to take a sip from the spout of a covered plastic cup, all the time continuing to read.

"Hi, Max," I said.

His hand twitched, his head jerked up. The cup dropped onto the floor and bounced into a corner. The cap popped off. Orange liquid spurted over the linoleum. Max's eyes bugged out at me. "Chris!" He gagged, coughed. "I thought you were—I thought—"

And the last major piece dropped firmly into place. "What did you think I was, Max?"

"I—" He got his voice going again. "I thought you were still in Sicily." He managed a flabby smile. "Hey, I'm glad to see you, buddy. When did you get back?"

I shook my head. "You dropped that cup because you thought I was still in Sicily? You practically choked because you thought I was still in Sicily?"

"Well, you gave me a start, partner. I thought—"

"You thought I was dead, Max."

As of course he had. That was what I'd come to find out, what I'd expected to find out, and what I'd been hoping I wouldn't find out. The story Antuono had put out to the press had said simply that a taxi on its way to the airport had been blown up, resulting in the killing of an unidentified passenger. Why should Max or anyone else assume it was I—unless they'd had a hand in it? "I think it might be helpful," Antuono had said, "if the person who tried to kill you were to believe he succeeded."

And so it had been. It had helped me find my would-be killer: none other than my old friend Max. Signor Massimiliano Caboto—lively companion, drinking crony, jolly descendant of the illustrious Giovanni Caboto.

As moments of triumph go, I thought sourly, this was far from a winner. I didn't feel like exulting, and I wasn't even consumed with satisfyingly righteous wrath at Max's perfidy. On the other hand, I wasn't wallowing in the Slough of Despond, either. Vexed, that's what I was. I'd wanted it to be Croce, or maybe Salvatorelli, or best of all, the evil, faceless Mob; I certainly hadn't wanted it to be Max, and the fact that it was made me damn irritated with him.

"Wait a second now," he said, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. "My mind's about as sharp as a doorknob with all the pills I pop. You know, now that I think of it, I think somebody did mention you were dead."

"Oh, sure. Who would that have been, Max?"

"Well, let's see now . . ." He picked up the cigar and took a couple of puffs, temporizing like mad. But who was there to name that I couldn't easily enough talk with later?

"No, it was you, Max," I said. "You're the one who had that bomb put in my bag."

He had gained back his wits by now, and decided the way he wanted to play this. He blinked at me through the cigar smoke, his expression humorous and wry, a man who didn't quite get the joke yet, but was willing to go along with it. "All right, I'll bite. Tell me, why would I want to put a bomb in your bag?"

"To keep me from finding out that you'd cut away the back of Ugo's Uytewael and replaced it with a phony back."

"Ah, I see. Of course." A flick of ash into the saucer. "And just how the hell would I manage that? I've never even had it in my shop. Check with Ugo."

"I did check with Ugo. He said you're the one who worked with the shippers to have his collection sent down to Sicily. Obviously, you'd have had plenty of opportunity."

Or maybe not so obviously. It had taken long enough to occur to me.

"Opportunity?" Max said. "What does that have to do with anything? Amedeo had it in his museum for a week. Benedetto Luca could have gotten his hands on it there, too. So could the whole damn staff. Clara Gozzi's the one who brought it back from London, for Christ's sake. Or are you accusing her, too?"

"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.