A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (19 page)

Max laughed. "Not really."

He lay back against his cranked-up bed with a sigh. He really did seem better. His face was no longer corpse-gray, and the bruised flesh of his legs wasn't quite so lurid; a dull yellowish-brown now, instead of raw purples and reds. Black scabs had begun to form along the edges of the punctures and incisions. And I had the impression the grumpiness was pro forma; a way of showing me he was on the mend.

"Are you still on pain pills?" I asked.

"Yeah, but they've cut way down. It really isn't that bad, Chris." He glanced down at his bear-trapped legs. "Disgusting, yes; agonizing, no. Now they're telling me I'll be up and out of this by the end of this month."

"That's terrific, Max." It sounded a lot more realistic than the end of the week. "Hey, did you hear that Blusher's donating his reward to the Seattle Art Museum?"

You don't often see somebody's jaw literally drop, but Max's did. "
Blusher
is? How much?"

"A hundred and fifty thousand."

"A hundred .....He tipped back his head and laughed. "Well, what's his angle?"

"What makes you think he's got an angle?" I said, as if I hadn't been wondering the same thing since the minute I'd walked into Blusher's office.

"Come on, I've met the guy. So have you."

I smiled. "He claims the publicity he's getting from it is worth it."

"Worth a hundred and fifty thousand bucks? Wouldn't you love to handle his PR account?" He shrugged. "What do I know. Maybe it is worth it to him. I'm glad it worked out for the museum." Suddenly he was tired, subdued. The muscles around his mouth had flattened. The pain was back, I thought.

I searched for something to make conversation about. "There was some excitement on the art-theft front today," I told him, feeling like the aged Cyrano reciting the news to Roxanne. "I got to see Colonel Antuono in action."

"Is that right?" he asked dully.

"Max, do you want a nurse? Do you need some pills or something?"

He shook his head. "I'm not due until seven o'clock, and I'm not about to let them make a junkie out of me. So go ahead. What did Antuono do?"

"He recovered a couple of stolen pictures from Cosenza.
Pittura Metafisica
, nothing big, but he thinks it might turn out to be related to the Bologna thefts. He told me—"

"Chris—" He started to sit up, grimaced, and sank back. "Look, I don't want to know anything about this."

"Well, he didn't mean there was a direct connection. But he thinks the dealer that tipped him off, Filippo Croce—"

"Chris, please!" He seemed really agitated. "Don't tell me any names. The less I know, the better, that's all. The less
you
know, the better. Why the hell don't you go home? What are you doing talking to Antuono? You don't know anything. Why take a chance on making them think you do? Jesus, you want to wind up like me?"

I tried to settle him down. "It's okay, Max, don't worry. All I was going to tell you—"

"Never mind, don't
tell
me." His eyes fluttered and closed. "Oh, God."

I leaned closer to the bed, put my hand on his wrist. "Max, listen. I understand why you don't want anything to do with this anymore. I'd feel the same way if I were you. Look, those five names you were going to pass along to Antuono—or anything else for that matter—I could tell him for you. Your name wouldn't have to come up. How can you just let them get away with it? What about Ruggero Giampietro? Just let them get away with murdering him when he got in their way? Max, I wouldn't tell Antuono where I got the information if you didn't want me to."

His eyes had remained pressed closed. He was breathing through his mouth.

"Max?"

"You know," he said softly without opening his eyes, "maybe I could use a nurse after all."

I had dinner again with Calvin. Then we walked back to my hotel for coffee and dessert in the bar. As we passed the front desk the clerk waved me down.

"A message for you, signor Norgren."

He pulled a form from a slot behind him and handed it to me. Tony Whitehead had telephoned. From Tokyo. I was to call him back at the Imperial Hotel. That seemed odd. He had telephoned just last night from Seattle, full of concern about my condition. It had gotten me out of bed, and we had talked for over half an hour.

I asked the clerk to have cappuccinos sent to my room and took the elevator up with Calvin.

"What's he doing in Tokyo?" I asked.

"Thinking about putting in a bid on that late Tokugawa screen, I guess."

"Good-bye, hundred and fifty thousand," I said.

Calvin peeked at the note. "The Imperial Hotel," he read admiringly. "The guy really knows how to travel. No dumps for Tony."

The glance at the hallway with which he accompanied this was patently disparaging. The Europa wasn't Calvin's kind of hotel. Nor mine. It was a commercial hotel, a big barn of a place, clean enough but shabby when you looked too closely at anything. I had made a reservation at a pleasant hotel called the Roma, where I always stay, but there had been a mixup and no room was waiting for me. With a big trade fair going on—Bologna has a lot of them—I'd been lucky to get this place. Of course, Calvin wouldn't have approved of the cozy, unpretentious Roma, either. He was staying at the four-star Internazionale a few blocks away.

I opened the door to my room, motioned him into one of the two worn armchairs, and picked up the telephone.

"Wait a minute," I said. "It's ten-thirty. Tony could have called hours ago. What time is it in Tokyo?"

The question delighted him, giving him as it did an opportunity to employ his high-tech wristwatch. He did something to his ratcheted safety bezel, pressed a micro-button on the mini keyboard, and consulted one of the dual LCD displays

"Well, um, it's two-thirty in Karachi," he said slowly. “A.M.”

"Hey, that's good to know, Calvin. I guess we better not call anybody in Karachi."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute." He fussed some more with the watch. "Tokyo! Ha! It's eight-thirty in the morning. Tomorrow, according to this." He hesitated. "Or is it yesterday? Which way does the international date line go?"

"I don't know, but we better get it straight. I don't see much point in calling him yesterday."

Calvin grumbled something and I punched in the thirteen digits it took to reach room 1804 at the Imperial Hotel.

 
"Tony? It's Chris."

"Everything okay there?" he asked. "You didn't get run over again or anything?"

"No. Oh, I've had a few interesting adventures with the Eagle of Lombardy, but that can wait till I get back."

 
"Who the hell is the Eagle of Lombardy?"

"
Colonnello
Cesare Antuono—the man who was so anxious to hear any shreds of information I might be willing to pass along?"

"Oh, Antuono, sure. Are you going to tell me what that tone of voice is supposed to mean?"

"Come on, Tony, the guy didn't have any use for me. The further I stay away from him the happier he is. That business about meeting with him to report 'pertinent' information— you set that up."

"Me? What for?"

"To get the museum some good press, I suppose. You contacted the FBI to offer my services, and the FBI contacted him, so he went along with it. But he didn't want to."

"Chris—"

"Tony, he told me."

"I don't give a damn what he told you. I'm telling you this FBI guy called me—I can't think of his name—Mr. . . . I can't remember. Out of the blue. Watfield, it was. Then he came over to my office. No, Sheffield. He told me he'd just gotten a call from New York, I mean from D.C., that this Colonel Antuono in Rome was looking for all the help he could get—that is, he was going to be assigned to a case in Bologna, and seeing as how we were involved in the art scene there—in Bologna, I mean . ."

Now Tony, as I mentioned earlier, has been known to deviate from the unadorned facts in the interest of the greater good, but I thought I knew him well enough to sense from his voice when I was being led astray, even over the telephone. When Tony lied, he was straightforward and fluent; it was when he was telling the truth that he tended to trip over his tongue and sound shifty. Which meant, unless he was being even more devious than I gave him credit for, that this was probably the truth. Which meant that Antuono had lied about it; he had asked the FBI for my help, then told me that he hadn't.

Which made no sense at all, whichever way I came at it.

 
". . . is all I know about it," Tony finished up defensively.

 
"I guess it was just a misunderstanding," I said.

"Of course. We're dealing with two different languages here. You didn't think," he said, sounding hurt, "that I'd purposely mislead you, do you?"

That was another question, best left alone. "Tony, what am I calling you about?"

"Well, I've had some news from Seattle I thought you might be interested in. You know that painting of Mike Blusher's—"

"Calvin told me. Blusher donated the reward to the museum."

"Not that one, the other one. The van Eyck. It—"
 

"The fake van Eyck," I said.

"Well, the thing is, it isn't a fake, not exactly. It—"

"What? Of course it's a fake! The techniques are eighteenth-century at the earliest, to say nothing of the
craquelure
, which is—"

"Will you let me say something, for Christ's sake? The van Eyck painting is a fake, yes. But Blusher took your advice and took it into the university to have it examined, and the panel that it's painted over turns out
not
to be a fake. Eleanor Freeman—"

"Of course the panel's not a fake! It's early seventeenth- century, manufactured for the Guild of St. Luke in Utrecht. I told Blusher it was real. I told
you
it was real—"

"You told me it was real," supplied Calvin, who was listening to my side of the conversation from his chair.

"I told
Calvin
it was real. Everybody agrees it's real. The
International
Herald
Tribune
says it's real—"

"
Time
says it's real," Calvin supplied.

"
Time
says it's real—" I said, then stopped. I hadn't heard anything from Tony for a while. Now there was a long, full sigh, deeply indrawn, slowly let out. An expensive one, considering that it was delivered from Tokyo to Bologna.

"Are you actually going to let me say something now?" he asked. "Like maybe two complete sentences?"

"I'm sorry, Tony, go ahead."

"In a row?"

I laughed. "What did Eleanor come up with?"

"Chris, the X rays show a painting under the van Eyck."

And not just any painting, either. Eleanor Freeman, the university radiographer-art historian whose specialty was Old Master fluoroscopic analysis, had concluded that the painting beneath the forged van Eyck "appeared in all probability" to be Hendrik Terbrugghen, an important seventeenth‑century Dutch painter and a member of the Utrecht Guild from 1616 until he died in 1629.

"I don't believe it," I said flatly.

"Why not?"

"Because it's all too weird, that's why. Every time I turn around there's another update on the story that's more bizarre than the one before. I don't know what kind of scam Blusher is pulling, but there's something."

"Chris, he just pledged the museum $150,000," Tony said reproachfully.

"Well, I'd spend it pretty fast if I were you."

"I'm working on it. Look, it's weird, all right, but it's true all the same. Neuhaus and Boden agree with her."

I relented slightly. "What's it look like?"

"Half-length portrait of a young man playing a lute, seen three-quarters from behind; very Caravaggist. You know the type; Terbrugghen's done a bunch of them. This one's monogrammed and dated 1621. I haven't seen the X rays yet myself, but Eleanor tells me even the brush strokes and the construction are right. She says if it's not by Terbrugghen it's by the world's greatest Terbrugghen scholar."

No, I thought stubbornly, not necessarily the greatest, just a Terbrugghen scholar. Eleanor knew the Old Masters' methods; so did a lot of other people, including forgers. You can check books on the subject out of the library.

"Any
craquelure
?"

"Yeah, and this time it runs the right way. And of course, as you pointed out, the thing is done on a Utrecht guild panel, complete with logo, from the first third of the seventeenth century—which isn't exactly easy to lay your hands on. So if what you're thinking is that it's a forgery, I don't see it."

I relented some more. "It sounds authentic," I allowed, "but I still—"

"Chris, listen. Would someone paint a first-class forgery, then cover it up with another one so nobody could see it? That's crazy. Look, tell me, just what is it you think the guy's pulling?"

"I don't know. How much reward money's involved?"

"None, as far as anybody knows. There aren't any missing Terbrugghens in the Interpol list or the carabinieri bulletin. It may never have been stolen. For all anybody knows, somebody painted over it a hundred years ago because he didn't know it was worth anything."

I still wasn't satisfied. "Tony, have they done any physical tests for age, any pigment analysis, any—"

"No, apparently Blusher jumped three feet off the ground when he heard the X-ray results, and he didn't want anyone fooling with it anymore. He had a truck there for it inside of an hour. I hear it's in a bank vault now."

"So what's going to happen to it?"

"Who knows? It's up to him."

"You mean he gets to keep it?"

"I don't see why not. Who else has a claim? The shippers say they don't know how it got into the shipment or where it came from, and nobody knows who owned it."

^“
What about the Italian government? There's a law about taking art out of Italy."

"Wrong, there's a law about taking
genuine
art out of Italy. You can take out all the fakes you want to. Blusher's saying that when it left Italy it was a forged van Eyck, not a genuine Terbrugghen, so Italy has no claim. Personally, I think he's right, and from what I hear so far, they're not going to contest it.