A Deceptive Clarity (29 page)

"No, I don't. What motive could he possibly have? Even if he believes that junk he wrote in those letters, how would substituting a genuine painting for a copy help him?"

"All right, forget the letters," Harry said. "What about simple greed? Maybe he stole the real one—the real fake, I mean—and switched ... No, what kind of sense would that make?"

"None," I agreed. "Stealing an original to sell it off and substituting a copy for it is one thing, but stealing a
fake
and substituting a genuine three-million-dollar masterpiece for it—why would he want to do that?"

"Why would anybody want to do it?" Anne asked sensibly. "It doesn't sound tike a very good business proposition. Harry, what do you think?"

"I think we better get back to the other room. Somebody's going to notice we've been in here a long time, and they're liable to figure out what we've been talking about."

"You're right," I said. "Let's go." But I didn't go, I stood there looking at the picture, chewing on my lip. "Come to think of it, where did this come from? It's been missing since 1944. That's why it's here in this alcove. I mean that's why the copy's supposed to be here in this room."

"It just doesn't make sense," Anne murmured. "No sense at all."

But it was starting to make sense to me. Just a glimmer of sense, a hazy vision of the threads that bound it all together; the hoax, the murder, everything. Even the storage-room break-in.

"No," I said slowly, "I think maybe it does make sense ... but we're going to have a hell of a time proving it."

"Proving what?" they said together.

"Harry, I've got an idea. It'd involve using one of the security guards and—well—staging a sort of incident.
 
Entrapment, some might even say.
 
Would you be game to go along with it?"

"Let me hear the idea first," Harry said warily, but I saw his dark eyes glint.

Chapter 20

After the reception about a dozen of us sat tiredly in a closed-off section of the Columbia House dining room awaiting a private dinner, courtesy of the Defense Department. The exhibition's senior staff was there, and the Bolzanos, and Emanuel Traben from the Frankfurt Kunstmuseum. There were some others too: a youngish air-force one-star general, somebody from the American ambassador's office, and a Bundestag member. An uneasy-looking Conrad Jessick was crimped into a corner chair, trying to look inconspicuous among all the brass.

Each of us- held a half-filled cordial glass. Robey had somehow acquired a bottle of brandy from recently discovered stores laid down by General Rommel forty-five years before, and he thought this would be a good time to open it.

"First of all," he smiled drowsily, "I want to offer a toast to the man whose generosity has made this magnificent exhibition a reality." He nodded in Bolzano's direction. I could tell that he hadn't yet gotten around to breaking yesterday's news. Maybe this was the final phase of the softening-up process. Robey raised his glass. "To
il
signor Claudio Marcello Bolzano."

He heard Flittner mumble "Hooray" as he lifted his glass. He had been as sullen and unsociable as ever during the reception, but I'd been surprised to see him there at all, since he had only three more days to put in.

The brandy was watery, but all of us made the silly faces people make to each other to show they've just tasted something special.

"I'd also like to express our appreciation," Robey continued, "to the German government for its extraordinary—"

He was interrupted by the noisy busting in of a guard who came galumping breathlessly over the hardwood floor in his heavy combat boots. It was quite dramatic. Anne, Harry, and I exchanged quick glances and settled back to watch.

"Sir!"

Robey turned, frowning. "What is it, airman?" His glass was still raised. He was the only one at the table who was standing.

"Sir, there's been a—we've had a problem. In the Clipper Room—one of the paintings—it's ..."

It was as if we were all in a movie and the projectionist had pressed the stop-frame button. All the little sounds and movements of people seated around a table stopped. No squeaking chairs, no scraping feet, no breathing, as far as I could tell.

"All right, airman," Robey said with pointed calm, "what's wrong? Nothing to be afraid of."

The guard glanced nervously around the table, as if he didn't know whether he ought to speak in front of us. Harry had picked a good actor. "One of the paintings, sir— somebody got in there—I don't know how—the C-system was alarmed as soon as the reception was over—"

"God damn it, airman!" Robey shouted, surprising all of us. "What the hell happened? Spit it out!"

"Somebody's slashed one of the paintings, sir. It's in shreds—"

I leaned forward and tried to watch everyone at once.

Lorenzo cried "No!" and stood gawkily up in uncoordinated segments, like a camel, his hands on the table bunching the cloth, his Adam's apple going crazy. His father sat deathly still with his eyes closed. Gadney's mouth opened and shut, but I don't think anything came out. Flittner's mouth just opened and stayed open. Next to me, I saw Robey grope behind himself for a steadying grasp on his chair. Jessick shrank more invisibly into his corner. Traben I couldn't see, but I heard a soft hiccup followed by a distressed burp.

"And, sir, they scrawled something on the wall—in blood, I think—some kind of political message."

"Political message?" Flittner croaked. "What message?" He shot a furious, frightened glare at me, filled with outraged innocence.
Not me!
his eyes shouted.

I was as interested in the guard's answer as he was. There wasn't any bloody message in the script; it appeared that our airman was indulging a flair for improvisation.

"Sic semper tyrannis,"
he said, deepening his baritone. Not bad. "I think—"

"Never mind," Robey interrupted with a panicky glance at Bolzano. "Which painting was it, for God's sake?"

"I—well, I don't know. It's the second one from the door, in the little room at the back. You know—"

"The little room?" Lorenzo repeated, his voice cracking with strained laughter. "The little room? You mean it's one of the
copies?"
I thought he was going to faint with relief. He sank back down. "Only a copy," he said shakily to his father.

"Second from the door … " Flittner said. "The Vermeer."

Claudio Bolzano jumped up so abrupdy that his chair clattered over backwards. "The Vermeer? The Vermeer is slashed?"

"No, no, Father," Lorenzo soothed, "only the copy."

And that did it.

"Only the copy, only the copy," Bolzano hissed, his black eyes snapping, his head waving from side to side like a cornered wolf's. I half-expected a lolling red tongue to slide out between his jaws.

"Yes, only the copy, signore," I said. "Why get so excited over a copy?"

"You ... fool!" He glared at me, choking on his emotion.

"Father,"
the mortified Lorenzo whispered,
"please.
You don't understand...." He reached a hand upward toward his father, but Bolzano easily swatted his gangling arm out of the way, and then, in a surge of sudden rage, backhanded him in the face with his closed fist. The sound of his blocky gold ring against his son's soft mouth was shocking and embarrassing, and Lorenzo's tall forehead blushed a brilliant pink almost before the blow struck.

"Idiota!"
Bolzano snarled. "You don't know the difference—"

He spun and took three quick strides toward the door, then stopped as violently as if someone had jerked a leash.

He turned, staring directly at me, breathing heavily, saying nothing. His tongue emerged, not like a wolf's, but quickly, like a lizard's, twice darting in and out over his hps.

"A trick."

"Yes," I said, "a trick."

"And the picture is really all right?"

I nodded.

"I'd sure like to know what's going on," Robey said mildly. "I'd really like to know what's going on."

Harry stood up, scraping his chair back along the floor. "Mr. Bolzano, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

Bolzano looked at him. "I'm not coming with you."

"Yes, sir, you are," Harry said. "By entering these premises you place yourself within the jurisdiction of United States military authority. I think we'd better go now, please."

"It was a cruel trick, signore," Bolzano said to me. "Of all people, you should have realized how cruel."

I pressed my lips together and said nothing, fighting the urge to pity this small man with the big, hurt eyes, who was aging and shrinking in front of us.
You tried to kill me twice
, I said silently.
You didn't hesitate over blowing up innocent guards. And you murdered Peter van Cortlandt, snuffing out that good man's life in the most vile, repellent way imaginable
.

"I realized," I said.

Harry took Bolzano's arm. "Chris, I'm gonna need you too. You mind coming along?"

The last words I heard as the door swung closed behind us were Robey's.

"Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?"

Chapter 21

"All right, I understand most of it," Anne said, shaking her tea bag up and down over her cup to discharge the last droplets, "but—damn!" The paper tag at the end of the string had come loose and the bag had plopped into the cup. She fished it out with a pencil and dumped it into an ashtray. "I understand that Bolzano had Peter killed because Peter found out about the Vermeer, and he was trying to do the same to you, and I sort of understand why, but there's a lot that still doesn't make sense, Chris."

"All right, shoot. I think I've got it all straight."

I should have. I'd just spent six hours in police offices, first at Tempelhof Security, then at
Polizei
headquarters, giving and gathering information while a numbed Bolzano went through the dismal process of interrogation and detainment.

The high point of the evening had come when I was asked if I could identify two muttering, arrogant hoods who had just been herded in by a squad of grim, efficient
Polizei.
I could, with ease and with pleasure. Skull-face was just as ugly and mean-looking as I remembered, No-neck just as awesomely houselike. Simply looking, at them brought a dull ache to the kink in my nose.

Finding them had been a personal coup for Harry. In looking through Bolzano's things he had seen the brief notation
10
in that day's space in a pocket calendar. He had suggested that the
Polizei
send men to the Inter-Continental, Bolzano's Berlin address, to see if anything turned up at 10:00 p.m., and the two thugs had walked in, finally justifying Harry's obsession with calendars and nicely wrapping matters up. In the nick of time, too; Harry was sure the subject of the meeting was to have been my overdue demise, which Bolzano had come to Berlin to oversee personally. When the two men were shoved into his presence, Bolzano, who had been contemptuously defiant until then, gave up, and it was all over.

It was after 1:00 a.m. when I got back to Columbia House, where I found a note from Anne asking me to call her whatever the time. When I did, she sleepily asked me to give her ten minutes to change and then to come over for something to drink and to tell her everything.

I asked for an additional ten minutes so that I could shower and change, too. I even managed a fast shave, but the cozy fantasies I'd begun to hatch didn't last any longer than it took me to walk the hundred feet of curving corridor between our suites. She had put on jeans, a blousy denim shirt, and tennis shoes, and not—of course not—the silky shift I'd been dreaming her into, and in which she would have looked smashing. And the drinks were tea, coffee, or hot chocolate.

As a matter of fact, hot chocolate sounded great after those long, grubby hours at police headquarters, and she looked smashing just the way she was. Which is not a bad way to look at things when nobody's given you a choice anyway.

"OK, first of all," she said, "what was the
point
of it all? Bolzano had that micropattern drilled in a real Vermeer, and a fake provenance made up, and all the rest of it. Why, exactly?"

"Because he couldn't afford to let anyone know he had his old painting back," I said, stirring the contents of the cocoa packet into the hot milk and contentedly sniffing the friendly aroma.

"But
why?
Had he collected some insurance on it that he didn't want to give back?" She shook her head. "No, that doesn't make sense. Why would anyone that rich need to go around killing people over insurance money?"

"It wasn't insurance money; it was self-preservation. They'd have put him away for the rest of his life if word had gotten out that he had his old Vermeer back."

"For the rest of his life? Are you serious?"

"He got it back on his own, you see, from an ex-Nazi in Potsdam, and he broke a lot of East German, West German, and Italian laws to do it. And apparently there was another murder at that time, too, aside from a few waggeries like smuggling and bribery. They would have had enough to lock him up for a hundred years."

She shivered. "What a horrible little man. Chris, what was going on in Peter's mind? Why did he tell you Bolzano didn't know anything about it?"

"Well, consider: Here's Bolzano, fiendishly proud of his collection and loving Vermeer above all other painters. Does it seem likely he'd pretend a beautiful, fantastically rare Vermeer was just a second-rate copy and stick it away with a bunch of old fakes that he obviously didn't give a damn about? There have been plenty of cases where collectors pretended their fakes were originals, but this is the first one I ever heard of the other way around."

I took a swallow of the chocolate. "I'd have said the same thing Peter did: Of all the people in the world, he'd be the last one likely to know."

"But what did Peter think was going on? After all, he knew the picture was supposed to be a copy of a real one that'd been looted. If
this
was the real one, then where did he think ... I mean .. . I'm confused."