A Glancing Light

Chapter 22

At the end of Via dell'Indipendenza he swung around the Piazza Medaglia d'Oro and into the parking lot of the railroad station. It was 11:00 A.M. There were people milling around in comforting numbers. He pointed at a public telephone. "Go there and wait for a call."

I walked to the telephone much reassured. If they'd been planning to kill me, I'd be speeding along an untraveled country road by now, not walking unaccompanied through a public place. With that all-absorbing worry removed, I began to get excited. Was it possible that the paintings were really about to be recovered? That I was going to be the instrument? There were all kinds of possible reasons for the recovery being handled in this peculiar way. Maybe the person with the paintings was hoping to collect an insurance company reward, but was fearful of dealing directly with the company or the police. I would be a perfect intermediary: uninvolved, knowledgeable—

The telephone rang. I snatched it up.

"Norgren?" The same voice as before.

"Yes."

"Listen. There is a buyer for the paintings. But he insists that an expert confirm they are what we say they are. He wanted to bring his own consultant to do this, but he was told no."

"Why?" I asked, as much to slow him down as anything. He was difficult to understand, and I wanted time to think through what he was saying. And although his voice was still muffled, I was beginning to hear something familiar in the cadence. If I could get him to keep talking . . .

"Why?" he repeated. "Because I don't trust him and I don't trust his expert, all right? He was told a reliable expert would be provided, a respected museum curator."

"And that's me?"

"That's you."

"Does he know it's me?"

"When you get there, he'll find out."

"And he agreed?"

"No more questions," he said irritably. "What's the difference to you? Now, you will be taken—"

"Why should I do this?" I demanded. "Do you actually think I'm going to help you get rid of those paintings?"

I wasn't being particularly brave. The area around the station entrance was filled with people. Pietro was thirty feet away, watching me without interest, placid and sleepy-looking, chewing on something (his cud?). All I had to do if I wanted to get away was duck into the station.

"You told me I could help recover those paintings," I said. "You didn't say—"

"And so you can. After you authenticate them and leave, you're free to notify your carabinieri friends as to the buyer's identity. Thus," he said almost affably, "a felonious receiver will be apprehended, the paintings will be recovered for their rightful owners, and you'll have the gratitude of the Italian nation."

And you'll have your five hundred million lire or whatever it is, I thought. "How am I supposed to know the identity of the buyer?" I asked him. "I don't imagine he's going to introduce himself."

"You'll know, don't worry."

"Why are you doing this to him?"

"I told you, I don't trust him, I don't like him. What do I care—" he stopped abruptly. "Enough questions. There's no more time. Go back to the automobile."

"Look, I need time to get ready for this," I said brilliantly. "It'll have to wait until tomorrow. I can't just go in and authenticate these things without preparation. I need—"

"You need nothing! It's now or never, do you understand?" His agitation level had shot up again. "I'm sorry I got involved with this in the first place. It's not worth it—one problem after another ... "

I knew who it was. There had been one too many familiar phrases sputtered in that familiar, frazzled manner. Bruno Salvatorelli. I glanced again at the bustling, inviting entrance, and at the bovine Pietro chewing away, staring into the middle distance. What if I dashed into the station now? I could get away with ease and tell Antuono what I knew.

But what did I know? Antuono already suspected Salvatorelli. And I still didn't know where the pictures were. We'd get nowhere, and Salvatorelli would find some other way of disposing of the paintings, perhaps for good.

". . . if you don't want to do it," he was ranting, "just say so, you understand me? I'll throw the damned things in the Reno and be done with them!"

That I doubted, but I couldn't chance it. "All right, I'll do it," I said. "But first I have to know—"

"You have to know shit," he said, and hung up.

Pietro drove a few blocks beyond the station to a neighborhood of nondescript apartment buildings. With featureless exteriors of raw concrete, they might have been built ten years ago or ten weeks ago. The ground floors were mostly occupied by small light-manufacturing operations— electrical switches, cardboard containers—or various kinds of wholesalers. All very functional and commonplace. It was hard to believe we were a five-minute walk from the colonnaded Renaissance streets of the city center.

We parked in front of a ten- or twelve-story building that looked like every other building on the block, and entered a marble lobby devoid of ornament or furniture. I tucked the address away in my mind: Via dell'Abbate 18. We took the elevator to the seventh story and walked to the end of a musty corridor that hadn't seen much recent use; it certainly hadn't seen much care. Pietro knocked on an unnumbered door.

"Who's there?" someone called from the other side.

"Pietro" was the mumbled reply.

What, no secret knock, no coded greeting? What kind of way was this to run a big-time heist?

The door was opened, first a crack and then all the way. Behind it—no surprise—was Ettore, Pietro's scarred, tough partner with the chewed-up ear and the mashed-down nose. Unlike his more easygoing associate, Ettore apparently hadn't forgiven me for inconveniencing him the previous week. There was no friendly "Ciao," only a malignant narrowing of his eyes and a peremptory jerk of the head to motion me in.

The moment I was inside, the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. The pictures were here, all right; I could smell the acrid, leather odor of old paint and ancient canvas. But all I could see, aside from some scattered, littered pieces of office furniture, was a nervous, buglike man with a polka- dot bow tie, who was standing near the single dirty window and watching us.

Again with no sense of surprise, I saw that it was Filippo Croce. If anything, I felt a little let down. "Is this the buyer?" I asked.

"Let's get to work," Ettore said. "Come on, dottore, earn your money. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish."

He's assuming I'm one of them, I realized. They think I'm being paid for this. Salvatorelli hadn't told them what's going on.

It had taken a few seconds for Croce to recognize me. "You're their expert?" he asked, advancing. "You're going to authenticate them?" His tone was part incredulity, part glee.

What was he so happy about? "Why not?" I responded gruffly. "You don't trust my judgment?" I saw no reason to disabuse anyone there of the notion that I was one of the crowd; just another crook. And I now understood why Croce, as buyer, had agreed to meet with, and be seen by, an unknown third party like me. He'd been told I was "their" expert, a bought, bent consultant.

"No, no, I trust it implicitly," Croce said. "It's just that I'm quite surprised. Delighted, really. I hope this is the first of many—"

"Let's get on with it," Ettore growled. "They're over here."

I went to the dusty table he'd gestured at, and involuntarily let out my breath. What I'd mistaken for an untidy pile of rubbish—rolled-up old blueprints or mechanical drawings— was, it appeared, an untidy pile of rolled-up Old Masters worth approximately $100,000,000. Not that Croce would be paying anything near that. There were also two painted panels, each about two feet by a foot-and-a-half.

I recognized the panels immediately. Two Madonnas Enthroned, one by Fra Filippo Lippi that had been taken from Clara's collection, and one by Giovanni Bellini from the Pinacoteca. They were a joy to see, their authenticity fairly jumping out at me. All the same, I thought that a little theater wouldn't hurt. I picked them up gingerly, peered at them from a couple of inches away, turned them over, muttered a little, and laid them carefully back on the table.

"Well?" Croce asked.

"They're the real thing."

"Ah!" he exclaimed. "I knew it the minute I saw them."

He sidled up to me, prattling away. "I saw them and I knew. I had faith, I had conviction. Basically, one appraises from the soul, from the innate, spiritual perception an art lover humbly brings to a timeless work of art. Don't you agree, dottore?"

I wondered if that was the way he appraised his Comic Abstractionists, too, "Maybe," I said. "But what do you need me for, then?"

"Faith," he said, "has its limits. This is a business matter."

"Come on, let's go, let's go," Ettore said. "We're in a hurry." He pointed at the rolled-up paintings. "Get on with it."

"That's, uh, not going to be possible," I said.

Croce looked shocked. "Not possible?"

"Huh?" Pietro said.

Ettore's battered face hardened in a way that made me back up a step. "What's the problem?" he asked.

The problem was the condition of the canvases. From the look of them they'd been rolled up two years ago and never unrolled since. Probably they'd been bound with string or rubber bands until today. The rolling-up had been done with care, thank God, but no matter how careful you are, you can't take a thick, stiff piece of fabric that's been out flat for centuries and curl it up into a cylinder without doing harm. The canvas buckles, and the old paint and varnish, friable as a layer of nail polish, splits and loosens. If you then try to unroll it two years later without proper preparation, you multiply the destruction tremendously.

Add this to the mutilation suffered when they'd been cut from their frames—whatever had been overhung by the lip of the frame had necessarily been sliced through—and the result was twenty-one irreplaceable masterpieces gravely damaged. Sure, they could always be repaired with modem techniques and materials that simulated the old ones, but that magic, indefinable beauty—what it was that had made them masterpieces in the first place—was beyond the reach of twentieth-century formulas and recipes.

"I can't unroll them," I said, and briefly explained.

Croce's foxy face clenched with suspicion. "I'm not paying for anything I haven't seen."

Ettore shrugged. "Please unroll them." He reached for the nearest one.

I grabbed his arm. He looked down at it, then up at me. "Don't do that, dottore."

I let go. I was sure he wouldn't need much of an excuse to take up where he'd left off on Via Ugo Bassi. A question of restoring honor, I supposed. He'd been on the pavement when Pietro came along and chucked me into the street.

"You unroll them," I said, "and they'll crack in a thousand places. They won't be worth anything to anybody."

The three of them looked at each other, not so sure anymore that I was one of the boys.

"I won't pay for anything that's damaged," Croce said. He nervously patted his gleaming hair, wiped his hands, and fingered the edge of one of the canvas cylinders, delicately bending up a small corner. It was as stiff as dried leather.

He bit his lip. "He's right," he said. "But you must understand I can't accept these without authentication. My instructions are clear."

We were at an impasse. Unrolling them was out of the question—I would have fought off Ettore and Pietro to prevent it—but I didn't want to see the deal fall through, because that would mean the pictures might go back underground for years, maybe even into the river, as Salvatorelli had threatened. I couldn't think of what to do. We all eyed each other uncertainly. Oddly enough, it was Pietro, surfacing briefly from his torpor, who resolved it.

"Well, can't you tell without unrolling them?" he asked. He picked one up in his big hand—I flinched, but he was gentle—and held it up to his eye like a telescope. "You can see inside a little," he reported hopefully, and handed it to me. "Maybe with a flashlight?"

"Oh, well, yes, of course," I said quickly, taking it. "All I said was I wouldn't unroll them. I never said I couldn't tell if they were genuine or not." At least I hoped not. No one contradicted me, so I suppose I hadn't. "But signor Croce here said he had to see them for himself, that he couldn't take my word for it."

Now, as hoped, Pietro and Ettore swung their persuasive glowers in Croce's direction. He cleared his throat, rubbed his temples, tugged on his bow tie. "I'll have to speak with my client about it."

Ettore jerked a thumb at a telephone sitting in a corner, on the dusty floor. "Call him."

"No, no, that's impossible. I'll see him tomorrow."

Ettore shook his head. "No deal. We either do it now, or not at all. You don't trust the great dottore?"

"Ah, you can trust him," Pietro said reassuringly. "Come on."

The sides had shifted again. Now it was Ettore, Pietro, and me against the irresolute Croce.

"All right," he said at last. "I'm at your mercy, dottore."

So he was; more than he knew. "Don't worry," I told him, "I won't lead you astray."

I was a little disturbed—but only a little—at my previously unsuspected capacity for duplicity. Tony Whitehead, I'm sure, would have been astounded. And probably delighted. Without giving Croce time to reconsider, I got down to work. I don't remember exactly how I got through the next thirty minutes, but it was a virtuoso performance. I went from one rolled canvas to the next, peering keenly into them (without benefit of flashlight, no less), pointing them toward the window and minutely rotating them—a degree this way, two degrees that way—like big kaleidoscopes. After an appreciative murmur or two, I would make my pronouncement.

"Aha, Correggio, without a doubt; the soft, painterly, almost antilinear style, the luscious flesh tones. . . And this, this with its icy elegance of line can be nothing but a Bronzino. . . . And this? Let me see—Ah! Tintoretto, no question about it. The masterly use of repoussoir, the receding diagonals . . ."

It was sheer mummery, of course. I couldn't see a thing. But luckily for me, they had a list of the paintings to refer to, and I somehow managed to bring it off. In a sense I wasn't lying, because I was sure they were authentic, even if I didn't happen to know a few trivial details, such as which was which. I knew it from their smell, their feel, their condition, a hundred little clues. Maybe even by way of a little innately spiritual perception.

"All right," Ettore said the instant Croce hesitantly nodded his acceptance of the last one. "Where's the money?"

"I'll drive you there," Croce said, darting his tongue over his lips. His protuberant eyes glistened. He was looking extremely shifty. More so than usual.

"That wasn't the arrangement," Ettore said. His face had stiffened, darkened, as if a shutter had clanked down over it.

"Of course it was. You're trying to change things now." Croce's voice was on the rise. "What do—"

"The money was to be left in two packages, wrapped in paper. Somewhere nearby."

"It is, it is Only fifteen minutes from here. Come, I'll take you."

"No, you'll tell us," Ettore said stonily.

"But—" Croce's forehead shone with perspiration. He looked at all three of us, but help wasn't coming from anywhere. "All right, then," he said. "It's in the Giardini Margherita, near the tennis courts. Just to the east of them, in the shrubbery, next to a stone wall, there's a—a concrete pedestal, a vent of some sort with metal grills in the sides. The grill on the east side, away from the courts, toward the wall, it comes off. The packages are inside, taped to the back of it. All right, are you satisfied? Now, if it's all the same to you, I'll take these and leave."

He said it as if he didn't think he'd get away with it, and he didn't.

Ettore ignored him. "Pietro, I'll drive out there and see if it's all right."

"I assure you–" Croce said.

"If it's all right I'll call, and you can let him have the paintings. Then drive back to where we started from. You understand?"

Pietro frowned while he absorbed this. "What if you don't find it?"

"He'll find it, he'll find it," Croce bleated.

"Well, I guess I'll go now," I put in. "I've done what I came for." Croce was lying, and I didn't want to be there when they found out. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get on the telephone to Antuono.

I didn't get away with it, either. "You stay, too," Ettore said.

"What for? I've done what I was paid for. I—"

"If I don't call in half an hour," Ettore told Pietro, "take the paintings and get out of here."

"Now you'd better listen to me—" Croce began.

"What about these two?" Pietro asked.

"Take them with you. If they don't want to go, beat the shit out of them. If they give you too much trouble, just shoot them and leave them."

Pietro nodded and patted his jacket, over the holster.

This exchange effectively silenced Croce. I wasn't making much noise, either. But a few minutes after Ettore left I probed for a little more information from Croce.

"Who's your buyer?" I asked offhandedly.

He frowned at me. His eyes swelled with affront. No stratum of society is without its code of ethics.

"Shut up," Pietro said. He sounded edgy. "I don't want any more talking. Sit down."

We sat. So did Pietro, first meaningfully unzipping the front of his jacket. It had begun to rain. For a long time the only sounds were the water thrumming against the window, the traffic noises, and the occasional whine of a jet.

Pietro looked at his watch frequently. After the ninth or tenth time he spoke: "Ten more minutes."

"Don't worry," Croce said with an unconvincing laugh, "he'll call. That vent isn't so easy to find."

Fifteen minutes later the increasingly uneasy Pietro looked at his watch a final time, chewed his lip, and came to a decision. He stood up, shoved a big leather suitcase across the floor with his foot, and pointed at Croce. "You."

"Me?"

"Put those wooden ones in there." The more nervous he got the more he slid into a kind of slow motion.

"These?" Croce said. "The panels?"

Pietro's heavy eyelids drooped. The big muscles in his heavy jaw moved. He took a ponderous step forward.

"All right," Croce said hurriedly. "Very well. They'll have to be wrapped first. I can—"

"No wrapping," Pietro said. "Just put them in."

"But he's right," I said. "You can't just toss them into a suitcase without protection. They'll be—"

The gun came out: stubby, nickel-plated, toylike in the big hand. It waved me quiet, then leveled at Croce. "Do what I say."

"Certainly, at once." Croce knelt, opened the suitcase, and lay the two Madonnas side by side in it, handling them with more reverence than I imagined him capable of.

He glanced up from his knees. "At least let me—"

"Now you," Pietro said. The shiny little gun jerked in my direction to indicate which you he was talking to. "Put the rest of them in there, too, quick."

I didn't see much room for argument. I picked up the first rolled cylinder, placed it in the suitcase as carefully as I could, and reached for the next one.

It was too methodical to suit him. "Come on, come on, just throw the damn things in."

"Look—" I said.

Pietro gestured for silence again, then stood motionless, head tipped, sleepy eyes suddenly alert. He was listening intently. All I could hear was the rain. He edged up to the window, his back against the wall, and scanned the street, shielding his body behind the casing. I was reminded of a hundred old movies. This was the scene just before the final barrage of bullets from the cops killed all the bad guys. Or maybe it was Indians, arrows, and ranchers.

Pietro turned back to us. "That's it. We're going right now. You, close the suitcase and pick it up," he told Croce. "You"—me again—"grab the rest of them and let's go."

"What do you mean, grab them?"

"Just scoop them up. Hurry up."

"Scoop them up?" I echoed. "You mean just—just—"

With his left hand Pietro reached around the side of the gun's barrel. There was a click that I recognized (those old movies again) as the safety being released. I gulped, bent to the table, and, as carefully as I could, gathered them up in my arms, all twenty-two of those precious, irreplaceable masterpieces, like so many old window shades to be taken down to the dump.

"Now," Pietro said, "out the door."

But at that moment the door, about four feet to Pietro's right, exploded from the wall with a window-rattling crash. Even before it hit the floor a stream of men in heavy vests and blue police uniforms burst into the room, shouting incomprehensible orders and brandishing handguns and rifles. Croce was swept out of the way. Pietro was still blinking with surprise, waiting for his brontosauruslike nerve impulses to make it to his brain and tell him what was going on, when the gun was deftly plucked from his hand. Two burly officers spun him roughly around and shoved him face-first against the wall. More men crowded in; there were brown carabinieri uniforms along with the blue ones. The room was all dust and pandemonium.

I couldn't believe it. I was so relieved I wanted to cheer. I think I did cheer. I know I laughed. "Your timing's great!" I shouted over the racket. "We—"

"Alto!" several of them screamed. "Zitti!" I didn't have to be told that these amounted to the Italian equivalent of "Freeze!" At the same time three pistols—heavy, malevolent black weapons, nothing like Pietro's shiny tiny toy— were thrust out at me, trained on the bridge of my nose. All were held by palpably overstrung men in the classic shooter's posture: tautly crouched, gun hand stiffly extended and supported at the wrist by the opposite hand. All three of the weapons were quivering.

Me too. It took me a moment to find my voice. "Gentlemen," I said in my softest manner and without moving a finger, "I . . ."

I what? I wasn't really heading for the door with $100,000,000 worth of stolen art in my arms? It only looks that way? I shrugged and closed my mouth. Things would work themselves out. The worst was over.

Almost. A slight figure approached from the side and peered at me. There was a long-suffering sigh.

"Weren't you supposed to be in America?" asked the Eagle of Lombardy.

"I can explain," I said, staring straight ahead. "Really."

"If you will put those paintings down over there," he said quietly, "I will do my utmost to see that these gentlemen don't shoot you."

At his nod and a few murmured words, they lowered their weapons—rather reluctantly, it seemed to me—and turned away. Antuono, in his black undertaker's suit, looked down his fleshless nose at me as I placed the rolled-up canvases back on the table.

"Colonel—"

"You could have been killed," he said. "Worse, you might have ruined the entire operation."

His prioritizing of possible outcomes did not escape me. "Colonel—"

"Do you know," he said musingly, "if you hadn't turned up blundering about in the midst of things—with the best of intentions, of course—I think I would have felt a sense of disappointment . . . of incompleteness."

He hadn't wasted any time getting under my skin again. I faced him angrily. "I didn't have to be here, you know—"

"Indeed."

"I put my life on the line for those paintings. If you'd let me, I could have been helping you all along."

"No doubt."

"Damn it, I told you days ago that Croce was involved, didn't I? But no, you—"

His attention had wandered. He was looking over my shoulder, a slow smile actually lighting up his pale eyes. "Wonderful work, Major," he said. "A year's effort—congratulations!" He reached around me to shake hands. "I believe you already know dottor Norgren?"

I turned.

"Sure, we're old friends," said Filippo Croce.