A Glancing Light

Chapter 3

So that was how I'd gotten myself involved in the Bologna thefts, at least from Tony Whitehead's perspective, and I suppose he had a point. I thought about it while he went back to Steamer's counter to get us some more wine, and when he came back I had an answer for him.

"I'll make a deal with you."

He brightened. This was the kind of talk he understood.

"I'll brave the Mafia and act as a conduit to the carabinieri, or whatever I'm supposed to do," I said, "if you put that sixty thousand dollars back in the Renaissance and Baroque budget to buy that Boursse."

"No way, Chris. Can't be done. It's too late to reallocate the budget. Absolutely impossible. I couldn't shake loose a dime."

I was familiar with Tony's style. I waited.

"Maybe twenty thousand," he allowed after a few seconds.

I waited. I sipped my wine and watched the sea gulls. What we were negotiating for was enough money to buy a small domestic painting by Esaias Boursse, a nearly unknown seventeenth-century Dutch painter. Most of his work deserves its obscurity, but occasionally he created paintings of stunning beauty. Some of them were believed for decades to be by Vermeer, which gives you some idea.

The one I had in mind was owned by Ugo Scoccimarro, who was on my list of people to see in Italy, inasmuch as he was lending us four paintings for the exhibition. I had seen the Boursse several years before—an interior domestic scene, exquisitely done—and asked Scoccimarro if he would consider selling it. To my surprise he had said yes, as long as it was to a museum. The price was a nominal $60,000.

This year I had finally gotten Tony to include it in our acquisitions budget, only to have the money snatched away for something else a few weeks later. It was a common enough occurrence; I had merely sighed and put it out of my thoughts. But I was reminded of it when I went to Michael Blusher's warehouse. The panel on which the fake van Eyck had been painted was much like the panel on Scoccimarro's Boursse, which I had previously examined and researched thoroughly. (That was how I happened to know all about the marks made by seventeenth-century water-driven frame saws, etc., not that I'd tell Blusher. Or Calvin, for that matter.)

So the Boursse was on my mind again, and it had belatedly occurred to me that there might be a way to get it after all.

"All right," Tony said, "all right. Maybe I could get you thirty."

"Thirty's no help. It has to be sixty. "

Tony examined me over the rim of his wine glass, his eyes narrowed against the sun. "You used to be such a nice kid," he mused. "When did you get to be such a wheeler- dealer?"

I grinned. "Been taking lessons from the best of them, boss."

He smiled back. "Okay," he said. "It's a deal."

"Un cappuccino doppio, per piacere," I called to the white-jacketed barman who stood leaning against the wall and looking, if possible, sleepier than I was.

"Va bene, signore, subito."

Like a mechanical toy that had just had a coin inserted into it, he jerked to life at his espresso machine, an imposing rococo apparatus of chrome tubes, levers, and spouts that sat in gleaming splendor on the marble countertop. He placed a cup the size of a bucket under a spout and slowly, with fierce, firm-jawed concentration, pulled down one of the long levers. With a faint, drawn-out hiss of steam the velvety aroma of good coffee suffused the cafe, and the big cup was half- filled with espresso as black as ink. A generous dollop of milk was tossed, not poured, into a metal pitcher and held up to another spout, thin and snaky, and still another lever was depressed. There was another hiss while the pitcher was rotated and jiggled, and in a few seconds the milk was a steaming froth. The barman topped off the cup with it, then lifted a shaker of shaved chocolate and glanced keenly at me for further instructions. At my nod the chocolate was sprinkled over the milk with a showman's flourish and the completed production was borne to the table.

"Grazie, " I said.

"Prego, signore."

He went back to station himself behind the bar and, with a sigh, leaned against the wall once more, exhausted by his efforts. The internal mechanism switched off to await the next customer. All was still.

Ah, Italia. It was nice to be back. Not that there was any shortage of espresso bars in Seattle these days, but for the real drama, the true spectacle, of cappuccino-making, you had to come to the mother country.

It was Monday, a little after 4:00 P. M . Italian time; seven in the morning by my biological clock, and I hadn't slept the night before, what with long, gritty layovers in Chicago and Rome. (Is it my imagination, or was there a time in the remote past, a time without "hubs," when you could actually fly directly from one place to another?) There was going to be a "small, informal" reception and dinner for me in three hours, and I was trying to perk up my sluggish nervous system with a fix of caffeine. I was also concentrating on an article in the International Herald Tribune, which I'd picked up at the airport and skimmed during the taxi ride to Bologna.

The piece began on an inside column on page four, and I'd overlooked it in the taxi, but it had my total attention now.

STOLEN RUBENS ON WAY BACK TO ITALY

Seattle—Peter Paul Rubens' Portrait of Hélène Fourment, conservatively valued at $1,500,000, will soon be back in the hands of its Italian owner, Clara Cozzi, almost two years after its disappearance from a Bologna restorer's workshop.

The theft of the Rubens, one of a trio of art burglaries in and around Bologna in the early morning hours of June 22, 1987, resulted in the murder of Ruggero Giampietro, 71, a night guard at the workshop. Along with five other paintings stolen from Mrs. Gozzi's palatial Ferrara home and some eighteen from Bologna's Pinacoteca Nazionale, the picture had been the object of a frustrating international search effort.

The seventeenth-century masterpiece was discovered unharmed by Michael Blusher, 46, a Seattle importer of objets d'art.

I paused. Just how reliable was this article? Could a reporter who referred to the stuff that Blusher imported as "objets d'art" be trusted? I took my first long, grateful swallow of coffee and continued reading.

Mr. Blusher, president of Venezia Trading Company, found the painting last week in a large shipment from Bologna. Attempts to determine how it got into the shipment have met with defeat.

"I knew right away I had something special," Mr. Blusher said. "The first thing I did was get a guard, which I paid for out of my own pocket. Then I yelled for help."

The help arrived in the form of Christopher Norgren, 34, Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Mr. Norgren immediately identified the two-by-three-foot picture as the stolen Rubens, a determination subsequently verified by other art authorities. American and Italian customs agencies have worked together to minimize bureaucratic delay, and Mrs. Gozzi's agents have already arrived in Seattle for the purpose of bringing the painting back. Mr. Blusher will receive a substantial reward, according to a spokesman from Assicurazioni Generali of Milan, which insures Mrs. Gozzi's collection.

A second object unexplainably included in the shipment was a panel bearing the purported signature of the fifteenth-century Dutch artist Jan van Eyck. This was denounced by Mr. Norgren as a forgery, although he identified the wood on which it was painted as an authentic Dutch art panel several hundred years old.

None of the twenty-four other paintings from the three thefts has been reliably located, although rumors abound. The total value of the missing objects is in the vicinity of $100,000,000.

Thoughtfully I put down the paper. I am not by nature distrustful of others. I may not be as gullible as I used to be (a good no-holds-barred divorce has a way of curing that), but I'm far from a suspicious person. All the same, I began to wonder, in an unfocused way, about Blusher. During the time that Calvin and I had been in his warehouse, I had had the uncomfortable feeling that we were being used, that he wasn't being quite honest with us. Was it the reward he'd been after, and not the publicity? We were by no means dealing with peanuts: The standard insurance reward in art- theft cases was ten percent of the value of the object. So if the Rubens was really valued at $1,500,000, which did indeed seem conservative, Blusher would come away from this richer by $150,000.

I swallowed the last of the cappuccino and sat a while longer, pondering. Then I went to my room in the Hotel Europa to shower, and to try to nap for an hour before the reception.

But sleep wouldn't come. I couldn't stop thinking about Blusher's $150,000 reward. I tossed irritably on the bed. Well, what about it? He deserved it, didn't he? Who knew where the Rubens would be by now if not for him? He'd found it, he'd had the perception to recognize it as something important, and he'd immediately contacted the museum. If Gozzi's insurance company wanted to give him a fraction of the money he'd saved them, what was wrong with that? Nothing at all. It happened all the time.

Just what did I think I suspected him of anyway?

Bologna la Grassa—Bologna the Fat—they called it in the fourteenth century, and Bologna la Grassa they call it still. The words refer to the richness of the fare, but they might just as well apply to the richness of life in general, or to the people, who are so much more robust and hearty than their dark, lean cousins in the south that they seem to be from a different country. (Talk to the Bolognese and you get the impression that they are. Africa begins just below Rome, the northerners like to say.)

In the surrounding countryside are some of the aristocrats of Italian capitalism: Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini. Riunite, too. And in Bologna itself the boutiques tucked away among the arcaded, medieval streets display fashions that rival Rome's, and the cuisine in the grand old restaurants is the finest (and among the most expensive) in Italy, which is saying something. What makes it all so peculiar is that Bologna is Italy's center of leftist politics, and has been for forty-five years. It is a rare tourist here who realizes that he is doing his shopping and gourmandizing in the largest Communist-run city in the Western world.

Certainly you could never tell from looking at the decor, the menu prices or the flashy crowds in the Ristorante Notai, currently the foremost restaurant in Bologna and therefore, arguably, in Italy. It was here, in a private room, that the "small, informal" reception and dinner in my honor was held, courtesy of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna's most prestigious art museum, and co-sponsor of Northerners in Italy.

My experience with receptions in my honor is pretty limited, but I have to admit I don't seem to have any moral or constitutional aversion to them; as a matter of fact, I haven't been to a bum one yet. This one was no exception, although I found myself wishing I'd had a chance to catch up on my sleep first, and maybe my Italian too; I was having a hard time following the volatile conversation (a couple of Camparis to start with hadn't helped any). In any case, I was relieved when dinnertime came and I was seated at a small table with three old acquaintances who took pity on me and spoke English.

The topic of discussion was the one everybody had been talking about all evening: the finding of Clara Gozzi's Rubens. Of course, I had telephoned her the previous week, as soon as I'd left Blusher, but to my surprise the news hadn't gotten around to anyone else here until its appearance in today's papers, perhaps because Clara was something of a recluse. She lived in Ferrara, some thirty miles away, and didn't often mingle in the Bolognese mainstream.

"What do you think, Christopher? You've met this Blusher." Amedeo Di Vecchio, Cinquecento scholar and eminent director of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, looked up from his tortellini di erbetta and squinted penetratingly at me through rectangular, gold-rimmed glasses that sat crookedly on a long, pinched nose. "Is he involved in some way? Is he a crook?"

"I don't know, Amedeo," I said as if the question hadn't been nibbling at my mind too. "I only met him once. I wouldn't say I'd trust him with my life, but as to his having any part in the thefts . . ."

Max Cabot's rolling chuckle drowned me out. "Mike Blusher? Impossible. Don't give it another thought. I've met the man too. Sold him a few things, as a matter of fact."

That surprised me. He and Blusher were unlikely business associates. Max was an expatriate American who had lived in Bologna for over a decade, and had made a niche for himself as a respected art dealer and restorer. He was good too, a former conservator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His work was sought-after and correspondingly expensive. So were the pictures he sold.

"I would have thought your stuff wasn't quite his style," I said.

"This was two or three years ago, Chris. Blusher was just starting out in the art world. No shortage of money, though. He bought a few lots of eighteenth-century Venetian pictures at one of my auctions. Second-rate vedutisti, mostly, but expensive. I got the distinct impression he didn't have any idea what he was doing." He laughed. "I understand he's into a somewhat different level of quality now."

I thought about the two dozen or so identical "Rembrandts" in the warehouse in Seattle, each one lathered with a quarter-inch of gluey, enamel colored, guaranteed-tocrackle-within-two-days varnish. "You could say that," I said.

"Two or three years ago?" Di Vecchio said sharply. "He was here when the Rubens was stolen?" His sinewy neck tilted eagerly forward. This was not mere curiosity on his part. The Pinacoteca had lost eighteen of its most precious paintings that night.

Max frowned. "Well, let's see. . . . The Venetian paintings were knocked down, oh, some time in April 1987. Or maybe May? The thefts weren't until June twenty-second and as far as I know he was long gone."

Max's certainty about the latter date was understandable. It had been from his workshop, where it had been undergoing restoration, that Clara Gozzi's Rubens had been stolen.

"But he could have been here," Di Vecchio persisted.

"No, you can forget it, believe me. Whoever took those paintings knew what they were doing. They were selective. Only the best. They didn't take any junk, either from me or Gozzi or the Pinacoteca. Nothing but the best."

"The Pinacoteca Nazionale," Di Vecchio said severely, "does not have 'junk.' "

Max laughed appreciatively. "Well, I do, or did at the time. I had four eighteenth-century canvases of very dubious provenance in the basement for cleaning. You know, 'School of Somebody' kinds of things. They were sitting about five feet from the Rubens, and to an uninformed eye they would have looked every bit as good. But only the one painting was taken. That kind of discrimination would have been beyond Blusher, I'm afraid."

Di Vecchio made a tight, irritated little movement with his mouth. "I'm not suggesting he carried it out personally, my dear Massimiliano. But he might have had something to do with it."

Max shrugged amicably. "Could be, Amedeo." Behind his soup-strainer of a mustache he chewed contentedly on a mouthful of torteilini.

Amedeo Di Vecchio and Max Cabot made an interesting study in contrasts. If someone asked you to guess by looking at them which was a son of Emilia-Romagna and which of Durham, New Hampshire, you'd answer without hesitation, but you'd be wrong. Di Vecchio was a bony six-two, a pallid, Yankeeish-looking man with a short, carroty Abraham Lincoln beard beginning to show some grizzling at its none-too-carefully groomed edges. Max was three or four inches shorter and thirty pounds heavier, graying and running comfortably to fat these days, with a smooth, padded complexion that made him look as if he'd been reared on tagliatelle and olive oil.

They were opposites in temperament, too. Max was easygoing and easy to be around, radiating satisfaction with his life. Di Vecchio was dour, itchy, critical, with a febrile glitter to his eyes like an Old Testament prophet's, at least if you can believe Bellini or El Greco.

"Well," our other tablemate said in his rich baritone, "at least we can be grateful that the painting's safe, what do you say?"

The speaker was Benedetto Luca, Regional Superintendent of the National Ministry of Fine Arts. Despite his imposing title, I had never gotten his precise function quite straight. But he had been extremely helpful in tunneling through the bureaucratic maze—sometimes terrifying, sometimes slapstick—that had to be negotiated in getting the thirty- two paintings in Northerners in Italy out of the country for a year. He was, therefore, a man of power and fortitude, and he was made for the part: white, leonine mane; patrician nose; craggy, lined face; voice as mellow and subtly colored as a bassoon.

The impression he made was so commanding, so mesmerizing, in fact, that I had known him for a year before I realized I had never heard him say anything intelligent, let alone profound. It was one banality after another—but, ah, what style.

"God willing," his resonant voice continued with conviction, "we'll get the others back, too."

"I hope so, dottore," Di Vecchio said absently. As host, he topped off our glasses with delicate, fruity red wine; Zuffa Sangiovese, locally made, and as pleasant and relaxing a wine as Italy produces.

By now the pasta course had been removed and the main dish brought: cuscinetti di vitello, veal scallops stuffed with prosciutto and cheese. The reverence with which the waiter and his assistant set it down made it clear that we were to give it our full attention, at least for a while, and we complied willingly. We concentrated on our plates and made discreetly appreciative noises.

That is, most of us did. Di Vecchio wasn't the type to murmur agreeably over food. For him, eating was a necessity, and from the looks of it, a grim one. He chewed in silence, slowly and methodically, sweating slightly, his mind somewhere else, his jaw ligaments shifting and cracking. Periodically, the fork was forced between unyielding lips, carrying one morsel of food at a time, at an unvarying rate; swallow one piece, shove in another, chewing rhythmically all the time, on the principle of the revolving garbage crusher.

Max, expectably, had a different approach. He was a man who enjoyed the pleasures of the table, and he made no bones about it. There were lip-smackings, eye-rollings, sighs of pleasure, exclamations. The food was tossed into his mouth with quick, happy little flips of the fork, which he held upside down in his left hand, European style (less time wasted that way). And all the while he managed a stream of cheerful chatter.

Dr. Luca had his own modus operandi, too, masticating slowly and weighing each mouthful with grave, head-tilted deliberation. The stock in which the veal was simmered—a trifle too salty? No, on second thought, quite good. The wine stirred into the drippings—is it not too, er, austere? No, no, on second thought, quite fine. Perfect, in fact. He seemed to be doing more cogitating than eating, but somehow the food was disappearing as fast as Max's.

Have I stumbled on a new psychological principle? Are people's eating styles extensions of their personalities? I'll have to ask Louis what he thinks. I know he enjoys my theories of psychology every bit as much as I enjoy his on-the-house counseling sessions.

After a few minutes the conversation came back to the theft of the Rubens. "You know what I keep thinking about?" Max asked. "I keep thinking about all the inside knowledge they needed. Somebody had to know the picture was in my shop at the time; somebody had to know exactly how to get by my door and window sensors, how to dismantle both security systems—"

"Who would know such things?" Di Vecchio asked, He looked uncomfortable. Somebody had known such things about his museum, too.

"I wasn't very smart about it," Max said with some bitterness. "A lot of people knew. Well, a few. Five, to be exact. I've gone over it a thousand times in my mind. Five people. The only thing they didn't know was that poor Ruggero would be there," Ruggero Giampietro was his longtime night watchman, an old friend hired whenever there was something particularly valuable in the shop. "So they killed him." He chewed steadily. "Or maybe they did know."

"A terrible thing, terrible." This from Dr. Luca, of course.

"I was familiar with your security arrangements," a prickly Di Vecchio pointed out. "I helped you plan them. Am I one of your five?"

"Sure," Max replied equably, "but I doubt if you did it." He followed this with a happy chuckle.

Di Vecchio was amused, but just barely. "I'm extremely happy to hear it."

I made my first contribution in a while. "Max, this list of suspects , . . Surely the police followed up on it?"

The look that passed between the three of them was hard to describe but impossible to misinterpret. A swift glance that managed to combine amusement, derision, awareness of secret knowledge, and cognizance of the venality of mankind—especially official mankind. All very Italian; done with the merest flick of an eyebrow, the faintest of shrugs, the most minute contraction of the lips. Even Max did it as if he were born to it.

"The police were bought off?" I said to show them it hadn't gotten by me.

"Who can say for sure?" Luca asked rhetorically. "Let us simply say that Captain Cala strutted furiously upon the stage, producing sound and fury, but in the end signifying nothing."

Despite the garbled paraphrasing, it was the meatiest thing he'd said all evening. And beautifully delivered.

"Captain Cala," Di Vecchio muttered with a snort of contempt. "Well, he's been removed now, and it's about time. I hope this Colonel Antuono who's coming is better, but I have no high hopes."

"I do," Max said, "I have an appointment with him the day after tomorrow."

Me too, I almost blurted out. Colonel Cesare Antuono was the man I was supposed to contact on Wednesday, according to Tony's instructions. I caught myself in time and kept it to myself. Not because I didn't trust them, but because Antuono would no doubt expect a report on the conversation we were having at that very moment. And I would no doubt give him one. Ratting on people, I thought miserably, would be easier if they didn't know about it.

"I think we'll find him a different sort, Amedeo," Max continued. "He's a big wheel, you know; a deputy director of the carabinieri's art theft unit. He's the one who got back those Pisanellos from Verona."

"Certainly, he has a fine reputation," Luca agreed wisely. "They call him the Eagle of Lombardy."

Di Vecchio gulped some wine, and snorted again. "And how much of the ransom from the Pisanellos found its way into the Eagle's own pockets, do you suppose?"

"Well," Max said with warmth, "I'm sure going to give him a chance." He swallowed the last of the wine, wiped his lush mustache with the back of a finger, and refilled his glass. Max could tipple with the best when it came to good wine, and he had already put away quite a bit of the Sangiovese. While he wasn't exactly smashed, his gestures had grown more expansive, his voice louder. A thin sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead.

"I'm really going to give him an earful," he declared, loosening his belt a notch. "There's a lot I can tell him."

The look that passed between Di Vecchio and Luca was a dark one this time. Di Vecchio glanced warily around at the other tables. Luca slowly licked his lips, frowning.

Di Vecchio laid a slim, cautionary hand on Max's forearm. "Massimiliano, you have to be careful. You can't go around shouting things like that."

"Someone might overhear," Luca said.

"I'm not shouting," Max said, and promptly lowered his voice. "Well, maybe a little. Anyway, what do I care if people overhear? I haven't made a secret of it." He made an impatient gesture. "Am I the only one who wants the rest of those pictures found?"

Di Vecchio made soothing noises. "Of course not. We don't say you shouldn't cooperate with the police. Don't you think I'm going to cooperate? But do you see me going around advertising it?"

"Think," Luca said somberly. "Think about what happened to Paolo Salvatorelli, God rest his soul."

"Paolo Salvatorelli?" I repeated. "Is he connected with Trasporti Salvatorelli?"

"Of course," Luca said. "The two brothers founded it; Paolo and Bruno."

At this point I got what is commonly, and accurately, referred to as a sinking sensation. Trasporti Salvatorelli was the firm I was counting on to ship thirty-two paintings worth over $40,000,000 from Italy to the United States. I had an appointment with them on Friday to confirm the arrangements and sign the papers. They had been recommended unreservedly by Max, who did most of his shipping through them, and by the Pinacoteca and the Ministry of Fine Arts— that is to say, Di Vecchio and Luca—both of whom had a lot more to lose than I did, since most of the paintings belonged to the state. Luca had, in fact, generously assigned one of his deputies to the onerous chore of grinding through the preliminary paperwork with Salvatorelli, which would have otherwise fallen to me. For this, I probably owed him my sanity.

So far, I had no cause for complaint, but lately the Salvatorelli name seemed to be cropping up in ways that did nothing for my confidence. Accidentally shipping Clara Gozzi's Rubens to Blusher without even knowing they had it, for example. And now, if I was understanding Luca, one of the two brothers who ran the firm had been done in by the Mob. You will understand when I say that I was starting to get just the least little bit apprehensive.

"What did happen to Paolo?" I asked woodenly.

They explained. It was a matter of common supposition that the Salvatorelli brothers had some knowledge of the art thefts of two years earlier—

I came halfway out of my chair. "What? We're trusting those paintings to—"

Luca's sonorous, calming laughter bathed me. "Knowledge of," he said. "That is not to imply any connection with. They are simply in a position to hear things, you understand."

"They're wholly reliable," Di Vecchio said. "We've used them many times. We've trusted our Guido Renis to them, and our Raphael. There's no cause for concern, believe me."

I settled back, not entirely pacified, while Luca, with some help from Di Vecchio, filled in the pieces: Despite these suppositions of "knowledge," the notorious Captain Cala, for all his sound and fury, had been no more inclined to seriously pursue the subject with the Salvatorellis than with anyone else. But Colonel Antuono was a different matter, and expectations had risen that the brothers would be subjected to painstaking interrogation when he took over. There were even rumors that Paolo had set up a secret contact with Colonel Antuono on his own. At that point the underworld had taken matters into its own hands.

Max brought his lengthy story to its point. "He was shot," he said to me with a shrug.

"Killed," Luca emended gravely.

"Not merely killed," Di Vecchio said, his small mouth twisted by a grimace of repugnance. "He was found in the Margherita Gardens with a cork stuffed between his lips. There were one hundred and sixteen bullets in his body."

"My God," I said.

"I have a friend," Luca said, his creased face grim, "the physician in charge of the mortuary. He told me that the bullets fell out of his body and rattled on the table like beads from a rosary." He let the unsettling image sink in a moment. "And now, of course, his brother, Bruno, will say nothing. Who can blame him?"

But even this wasn't enough to subdue Max entirely. "Look," he said, "nobody would hurt me. Paolo Salvatorelli was one of them. Everybody knows that. He could tell secrets, inform on them, break the code—"

Di Vecchio stiffened in the way that many Italians do when the Mafia comes into the conversation, even indirectly. "The code?" he repeated coolly. A long time before, he had made a point of telling me that the long arm of the Mafia no longer reached to Bologna. "The spirit and collective solidarity of the cooperative movement have eliminated it here," he had informed me. Amedeo Di Vecchio frequently sounded like the dedicated Communist he was.

"Hell, forget it," Max mumbled, a little bellicose now. "Don't worry about me, I can take care of myself just fine." He got up to head for the restroom with the doggedly straight, precise stride of a man who's had too much to drink and is therefore bent on showing how steady he is on his feet.

"Ah, but can he take care of himself?" Luca asked doubtfully, watching him go. "Massimiliano has many virtues, but is prudence one of them?"

"Oh, I think Max is pretty prudent," I said. "He's had a little wine tonight, but—"

"When the theft at the Pinacoteca occurred," Di Vecchio interrupted, "the first thing I did was to telephone the other local museum directors and some of the more prominent gallery owners to tell them to be on their guard. These things often occur in clusters, you know."

"I know."

"I awoke Massimiliano from sleep. When I warned him he could be next, his response was to laugh." Di Vecchio allowed himself a thin, retributive smile of his own. "The only painting of value in his shop, he informed me, was Clara's Rubens, and it was unlikely that the thieves would know about that or even bother with it, given the riches they had already helped themselves to at the museum. No, they were probably already on their way to Rome. What did he do? Nothing. He went back to sleep, simply leaving the useless Giampietro to his task." He twirled his wine glass irritably by the stem. "Do you call that prudence?"

"No, indeed," Luca answered for me.

"What about Clara Gozzi?" I asked. "Did you warn her?"

"No," Di Vecchio said defensively. "Why would it occur to me they would go to Ferrara?"

Max came back looking fresher. He'd washed his face and dampened and combed his hair, and I caught a whiff of the cologne the Notai stocked in its restroom.

He was more conciliatory, too. "Look," he said amicably, "all I meant was, what can I do that anyone would be so afraid of? I don't have any inside secrets. I can just tell what happened to me, that's all—the same as you. It's my duty. They're not going to go around killing ordinary citizens."

Luca waved a magisterial hand. "It makes no difference. These policemen are all the same, you'll see. One way or another this Colonel Antuono will line his pockets."

He let go a deep sigh. "0 tempera!" he said "0 mores!" Understandably, he did better with Cicero than with Shakespeare.